


The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance

by error404_happinessnotfound



Category: Monsta X (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Detectives, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Detective Hyunwoo, Detectives, Heavy Angst, Kid Hyungwon, Kid Minhyuk, Missing Persons, Psychologist Hoseok, Psychology, Sex Trafficking, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, detective jooheon, kid kihyun, sorry changkyun you never made it into the story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-19
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-17 23:27:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 11
Words: 38,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28857327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/error404_happinessnotfound/pseuds/error404_happinessnotfound
Summary: Hyunwoo is a small town cop who has transferred to the big city. This is his first chance to really make a difference, and his skills are called upon altogether too quickly.
Comments: 23
Kudos: 28





	1. Chapter 1

> _And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?_
> 
> _I did._
> 
> _And what did you want?_
> 
> _To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.”_
> 
> _― Raymond Carver, A New Path to the Waterfall_

“Remind me why you transferred here?” Officer Lee asked, rolling to a stop at the stop sign. Jooheon was giving Hyunwoo the tour of their district, which left a lot to be desired. Cracked sidewalks sprouting with weeds, boards covering shop windows that had been smashed with bricks, unfinished or abandoned complexes empty of residents. Even the streetlights looked reluctant to be there.

To say the least, it wasn’t particularly hospitable. “Just needed a change,” Hyunwoo answered vaguely, looking out his window. There were a few boys grouped together on the corner of the intersection, one of them leaning against the streetlight, but not many other people out on the street.

“If you were looking for a vacation, then the Tampa suburbs were a poor choice,” Jooheon commented lightly, not seeming to care whether or not Hyunwoo was planning on sticking around but still wanting to throw his two cents in anyway. “There’s nicer parts of Florida if all you want is a little sun and some palm trees.”

“I’m not here for a tan,” Hyunwoo replied, looking over at the officer that had been appointed as his partner and temporary mentor. “There just wasn’t much to do at my old precinct.”

“That won’t be a problem here,” Jooheon said with a slight upward quirk to his lips, but his eyes stayed dark and troubled. “Drugs are probably our biggest problem, but there’s a lot of small-time crime to keep us busy. Someone breaking into the gas station for a bottle of vodka. Stuff like that. Small enough to cause trouble, but big enough to summon a cop car.”

He sighed as they cruised through what looked to be another low-income neighborhood. “But in the time it takes you to apprehend one offender, three other petty crimes have occurred.” Jooheon shook his head as he slowed down to a crawl, seemingly driving aimlessly around the area. It was hard for Hyunwoo to tell if they’d already been down this street or not since they all looked similar to him at a first glance. “To your right is one of our watch zones,” Jooheon said, and Hyunwoo looked out his window, trying to take in the scenery and commit it to memory.

There was a scraggly chain link fence surrounding the property, which included a nearly empty expanse of cracked blacktop that backed up to a three-story building that seemed to provide low-quality housing for local residents. Each unit had a balcony that overlooked the blacktop, and most balconies were empty save a cheap folding chair and the occasional small table. Hyunwoo counted a total of two plants, one of which was already long dead and the other of which was well on its way.

“Why is it on your list?” Hyunwoo asked as he continued soaking in details. A cement curb lined the parking lot, and a few crushed cans lined a small length of it like lonely soldiers marching along the perimeter.

“It’s essentially one big drug den,” Jooheon said with a sigh that was more than just disappointed. He sounded frustrated, too. Like he had something personally staked on the success of the property.

Or maybe the people in it.

“You think someone’s running something out of here?” Hyunwoo asked. One of the cans wobbled in the breeze and pitched forward, clattering against the blacktop and falling still.

Hyunwoo drew his attention away from the fallen soldier and back to Jooheon as his partner spoke up. “It’s not exactly a singular cohesive organization. And the dealers don’t live here, not to my knowledge. But they get the residents hooked on their drug of choice – heroin, mostly. Cocaine for some.”

“And you guys can’t bust them?” Hyunwoo asked, looking back out at the sad building. It looked like it was trying to crawl back into the earth but had been rejected from doing so.

Jooheon sighed, massaging at his chin with one hand. “It’s not that we can’t. But we need to get the dealers too, all in one scoop, and they’ve been pretty elusive thus far. But it’s more than that. A lot of the residents here have kids, and if we bust them...” He shrugged unhappily, leaving Hyunwoo to pick up his trail of thought.

“Wouldn’t the state just take them into custody?” Hyunwoo asked. “Wouldn’t that be better for them?”

“It would be, if I had any confidence that they’d make it into better homes,” Jooheon said, jaw clenched. “But I’m sad to say that I don’t have that confidence, not yet at least. And I’m worried that if we busted the residences and if the only repercussion was a fine and no jail time, then they’d keep the kids and have even less money to take care of them.” He sighed, finger tapping against the wheel like he wanted to move past this neighborhood but wasn’t yet ready. “I just want to do what’s best for them, and I haven’t been sure what that’ll be just yet. But keep an eye out for their dealer, when you’re checking up on this area, and let me know if you find anything out. I want to be ready to jump on that opportunity if it arises.”

“Got it,” Hyunwoo said with a nod, and Jooheon nodded back before giving the car a little gas. The complex faded into the distance behind them as Jooheon continued his tour, and they eventually ended up back at the station.

“We switch rotations every week, and we’ve broken down the area into four main quadrants. You’ll be starting in quadrant three, so then on week two...”

“Quadrant four, then week three, quadrant one,” Hyunwoo filled in intuitively, and Jooheon nodded.

“I usually do two rounds each day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon or evening. You’ll be on the patrol rotation three days a week and at the station the other two. I’ll show you your desk tomorrow, and then the day after, you can get started.”

“And what’s the objective exactly?” Hyunwoo asked as Jooheon hopped out of the driver’s seat. Hyunwoo followed suit, exiting the car and trailing after Jooheon to the station doors but not going inside just yet since he’d been informed that they were still getting his cubicle ready.

“For now? Just try and get to know the local characters. If you see something illegal, report it, but otherwise, just introduce yourself to the area so they get used to your face. People can be a little suspicious out here, of law enforcement and outsiders particularly, and you’re both, so just be ready for that. Southern hospitality isn’t exactly Tampa’s claim to fame.”

Hyunwoo nodded and slipped his hands into his pockets, feeling the teeth of his car keys scrape lightly against his palm. “All right. Thanks again for the tour, I appreciate it.”

“No worries,” Jooheon said. He seemed to be a pretty down-to-earth guy and a local, judging from his demeanor. Hyunwoo hoped they’d get on all right as partners since his last partner had been particularly inept and unmotivated. Jooheon was already head and shoulders above him. “Do you need help moving into your new place? I get off at five if you need an extra hand.”

“I’ve got it covered, thanks,” Hyunwoo said with a polite nod, and they parted ways in front of the station.

Hyunwoo got in his car and drove around a little bit, trying to ingrain a few local landmarks into his mind by which to navigate. He passed the watch zone Jooheon had mentioned and took a mental snapshot of the sign on the side of the building identifying it as the Walour Motel. Then he worked his way back to his studio apartment which, like the town, paled a bit in comparison to his previous residence. Still, it had four walls and a toilet that flushed, so he had no complaints.

He parked in his assigned spot and started carrying up boxes, giving a congenial nod to any new neighbors he passed along the way. Once he’d finished the migration process from car to room, he took a look around and started unpacking. Each box was marked on the side in Sharpie with a clue as to its contents, so he started with the kitchen and worked backwards.

His mattress wasn’t scheduled to be delivered until tomorrow after work, so once he’d finished unpacking, he collapsed the boxes and laid them one over the other until he had a space big enough to lay on that would hopefully be softer than the floor.

He laid back, shifting in an attempt to get more comfortable even as his shoulder blades dug into the cardboard, and stared at the ceiling of his new apartments.

He hoped he would like working here better than the last place. It had been another suburb, but that was where the similarities ended. Middle-class families with two-parent households populated the area, and there was an abundance of parks and community programs to keep the kids busy and socially engaged. The library even held yoga classes on Sundays.

It was a nice little pocket of the country, for sure, but there wasn’t much crime. Which was a good thing, for everyone who lived there, but it made Hyunwoo’s job somewhat unnecessary. He spent more time fixing kids’ bike chains than he did arresting anyone. And it wasn’t necessarily that he wanted to arrest people, but...he wanted to feel like his presence made a difference.

It seemed like he might have the opposite problem here, that even if he spent all day resolving conflicts, he wouldn’t make a dent. It would be like slapping duct tape over a leak in the ceiling when the entire window was open and letting the rain pour in.

He could at least try, though. And if it felt like too much, he’d just put in another transfer request. No one would blame him.

But he didn’t like the idea of leaving behind a place and a people that needed help. And he liked the idea of running away even less.

He’d put in the transfer request if he had to, but he hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

\--

“This is your desk,” Jooheon said as he led Hyunwoo into the station the next morning and stopped before an empty cubicle, hanging over the divider and peering down at the desk as though expecting something to appear. “Right next to my desk, by the way. So I’m right here if you need anything.”

“Great,” Hyunwoo said, feeling a little awkward as he hovered by the desk, not wanting to sit down when Jooheon was still standing but not really sure what else he was supposed to do in the moment.

“ _Especially_ great,” Jooheon said with a nod, “because this other officer used to be sitting here – I made him move so you could sit next to me instead – and now he’s stuck next to some other poor sap who hopefully likes sad Madonna songs more than I do.”

“Oh- you didn’t have to kick someone out for me to sit here,” Hyunwoo said, feeling twice as awkward now that he knew he already had a potential enemy in the station and he’d only talked to one person so far.

“Nah, it worked out best for everyone, trust me. You get to stick close to me, I’m rid of that guy and his poor music taste, and he’s a lot closer to the coffee machine now which is perfect since drinking coffee seems to be all he does. Trust me, it’s fine that you’re here.”

“Okay...” _If you say so,_ Hyunwoo thought, setting a briefcase on the desk that had some basic files he wanted to store. He’d never transferred stations before, so he wasn’t quite sure how everything would work out, but it seemed to be going more smoothly than he’d expected. Maybe that was due to how badly they needed assistance.

“You get settled in here, then I’ll take you to meet the chief,” Jooheon said, slapping the divider before sitting down in his own chair.

Hyunwoo was able to breathe a little more easily now that he had a minute to himself, and he took his time setting up his desk just so. An IT guy came by a few minutes later with Hyunwoo’s computer, as the other officer had insisted on keeping his own machine even though all his data was stored on a unique user profile. Hyunwoo stood back while the technician got him all hooked up, and he thanked him before settling back into his chair and testing out the login credentials he’d been given. He hit enter, and a small circle started spinning mid-screen to let him know that the computer was trying to decide whether it trusted him enough to allow entry.

“The network is super slow, by the way,” Jooheon called out from his cubicle as though sensing Hyunwoo’s predicament. “If you’re a coffee guy, I’d suggest getting a cup while you wait. By the time you get back, you’ll probably be in. Maybe.”

Hyunwoo sighed but did as recommended, wandering further into the station. At one point, he heard what sounded like faint Madonna music, and he followed the melancholy tune toward what he hoped was the coffee machine. Sure enough, he passed by an officer who was similarly waiting for his computer to log in, pen tapping to the beat.

Hyunwoo passed him in a hurry just in case he was still upset about switching desks. He found the coffee maker in the adjacent room, and he got himself a cup of Joe before returning to his desk just as the buffering circle was replaced with his desktop.

“Perfect,” he said as he pulled up the Internet browser and tried to resist from groaning as he got another buffering symbol. This one disappeared in just a few seconds, thankfully, and then Hyunwoo got to work. He felt oddly secretive about it, as he didn’t want Jooheon to pop over and look at his screen, so he angled himself slightly to block Jooheon’s line of sight as he began looking up their town.

Most of what he found echoed what Jooheon had already told him – alcohol, heroin, and cocaine were listed as highly abused illegal substances. A few news articles came up about recent events, including someone robbing a store at gunpoint and another teen found dead as a result of overdosing on illegal substances. Hyunwoo was saddened that the author of the article had felt it necessary to include “another” in the title, and he wondered how many deaths warranted that detail.

It also mentioned that the teen, like others, had been found near Widowmaker’s Bridge. When he tried typing “Widowmaker” and their town in, though, he mostly got hits from some video game and articles about a type of heart attack. He would have to ask Jooheon about it later.

When he heard the wheels on Jooheon’s chair roll back abruptly, he quickly closed out of the window and looked over at him.

“All settled in?” Jooheon asked, and Hyunwoo nodded, standing up along with him. “Let’s go talk to the chief then.”

\--

The chief was firm but polite. Like Jooheon, he seemed surprised that Hyunwoo had requested a transfer here (although, to be fair, Hyunwoo had only specified “No preference” on the transfer request, so he hadn’t exactly asked to be placed here specifically). And like Jooheon, he seemed to expect Hyunwoo to leave at any moment.

“If anything changes, just let me know,” he told Hyunwoo, who nodded and thanked the chief for his time.

Then he and Jooheon were heading back to their desks.

“Now what?” Hyunwoo asked, tapping his thigh. Maybe it was the coffee kicking in, but he was ready for some action.

“Now nothing,” Jooheon said with a small snort. “Today is Tuesday, which means you and me-” He pointed at himself and then at Hyunwoo. “-are on paperwork duty.”

“Paperwork?” Hyunwoo couldn’t deny the slight disappointment in his gut.

Jooheon seemed to sense it and laughed again. “That’s right. I know you’re eager to hit the road, but that can wait til tomorrow. Today, we fill out paperwork so we don’t get sued or have to let a perp go on some stupid liability issue.”

Hyunwoo sighed and turned back to his computer, not having realized that letting it idle for the fifteen minutes they’d been gone would force his account to lock down until he reentered his password.

The circle started spinning again, and Hyunwoo tossed his head back in exasperation.

\--

The paperwork hadn’t been glamorous, but patrol hadn’t been altogether that glamorous either. Hyunwoo patrolled quadrant three, as Jooheon had specified, on Wednesday and Friday. He checked in with the local businesses and introduced himself, taking in their wary eyes and long stares and trying to make himself seem as approachable as possible. Not easy with his height and build.

Still, when he looped back around Wednesday afternoon, he at least got a few nods, and by the second loop on Friday, he even got a wave or two. On Monday, he’d start patrolling quadrant four.

He cooked for one after work on Friday, mumbling admonishments to himself as he almost burnt his dinner for the second time. Back home, he’d had a Friday tradition of patronizing a local restaurant on his way home from work, picking up some fried wings and beer so he didn’t have to cook at the start of the weekend. But he didn’t know many of the restaurants around the area just yet, so for now, he was forced to eat his own cooking. Which quickly reminded him why he didn’t cook altogether that often.

He took a few bites before boxing the rest up and putting it in the fridge for the time when he was hungry enough to consider it a decent meal. That day wasn’t today, unfortunately. So he instead snacked on chips to curb his hunger and finally laid back on his nice layer of cardboard – his mattress had been delayed twice now due to some shipping mix-up – and stared up at the cheap popcorn ceiling.

Was he happy here?

He wasn’t sure.

But was he happier here than where he’d been before?

He still wasn’t sure. He needed to give it more time. If he still had doubts in a month, then he’d transfer. No need for his masculinity to feel wounded because of it. He’d tried it out, and maybe it wasn’t for him. That didn’t mean he wasn’t a decent cop. It just meant that...

He wasn’t sure, and he didn’t want to leave before he could answer that question. What would he lose by leaving?

He couldn’t be sure yet, and it had only been a week. He’d reevaluate in a month, which would pass a hell of a lot faster after his mattress finally came in.


	2. Chapter 2

> _“there isn't enough of anything_
> 
> _as long as we live. But at intervals_
> 
> _a sweetness appears and, given a chance_
> 
> _prevails.”_
> 
> _― Raymond Carver, Ultramarine: Poems_

Hyunwoo’s mattress ended up arriving Saturday night, which meant he got two decent nights of sleep before patrolling quadrant four on Monday.

Quadrant four was much the same as quadrant three. There was the same pervasive sense of the area being run-down, but quadrant four appeared to be more residential, whereas quadrant three was more commercial. It meant that there were less businesses for him to check in with, so he decided to park and take a walk around the area on foot instead. Maybe he’d meet some residents and introduce himself, although he thought that might seem weird. He wasn’t sure; he’d make it up on the go.

He’d been walking for several blocks when he came upon the Walour Motel. He briefly considered walking a block out of his way to avoid it, given what Jooheon had told him, but he changed his mind when he saw some activity in the parking lot.

He drew closer but didn’t enter the property, just smiling softly as he watched a young boy kick one of the empty cans, two other boys cheering as he sent it skidding across the parking lot.

“Mine’s furthest! I win!” he declared quickly over the protests of one of the other boys who claimed that his attempt didn’t count.

They bickered for a few more seconds before falling eerily silent, and Hyunwoo realized abruptly that they’d spotted him. No point watching from afar now.

“Hi,” he said, approaching the fence but still not crossing over onto their property. He had no way of confirming his suspicions, but he felt that stepping into their world would seem invasive. So he stayed outside the fence but waved through the chain link.

Already, he heard small footsteps fading, and a few other kids who must’ve been nearby faded into the background, leaving only the three he’d first seen.

“Who’re you?” the winner of the can game asked, squinting at him with open hostility.

Hyunwoo put on what he hoped was a nice smile. He was a little nervous, to be honest. He wasn’t great with kids. Or maybe it was more accurate to say that they just didn’t like him. “I’m Officer Hyunwoo. I’m new here.”

“We don’t talk to cops,” the boy said, crossing his arms, and the other two kids looked at him as though taking cues before crossing their arms as well.

“We don’t talk to cops,” one of the others repeated, and the third kid nodded.

“We don’t have to talk,” Hyunwoo said, stalling. Of all the locals he’d met so far, they were the most open with their distrust of him, and he was trying to figure out how to work his way around that. “I just wanted to say hi.”

“Hi,” one of the younger two boys said. His hair was a soft light brown that matched a pair of eyes that held noticeably less hostility than the other boy, and there were red patches of skin at his elbows. He scratched at one of them absently before the oldest boy – Hyunwoo thought he was the oldest since he seemed to be in command – smacked his hand away from his arm.

“Don’t scratch, you’ll make it worse.”

“Sorry.”

“Yeah.” The oldest one continued to glare at Hyunwoo, who cleared his throat.

“What are your names?” Hyunwoo asked. He was trying to remember how to make small talk, and he wasn’t sure he was doing it right. Normally, in his old precinct, the parents would accompany their kids, and he’d just keep up a conversation with them. Was kid small talk even the same as adult small talk? No one had trained him for this.

“Why should we tell you?” the kid asked.

“Well, you said you don’t want me talking to you, but I need to know who not to talk to.”

The kid seemed to weigh over the answer while Hyunwoo observed them. He estimated the oldest kid to be maybe fourteen or fifteen, the younger two maybe twelve or so, but it was hard to tell since they were all rail thin. “Kihyun,” the boy said after a minute, apparently having decided that Hyunwoo’s reasoning was sound.

“I’m Minhyuk,” said the kid who had complained about not winning the game. He had a wide smile that stood at odds with Kihyun’s crossed arm and glare.

“Hyungwon,” the third boy said, head tilted up at the clouds as though he’d already forgotten why they were answering the question. Already, his hand was creeping back up towards his opposite inside elbow.

“I told you to stop that,” Kihyun snapped, grabbing Hyungwon’s hand to stop him from scratching at his skin.

“Is he hurt?” Hyunwoo asked, genuinely worried. He had a first aid kid in the car, but he was parked a few blocks away. He figured he could be back in five minutes if he ran. But if Hyungwon had an infection from a dirty needle...

“No, it’s just eczema,” Kihyun said, grabbing Hyungwon’s other hand and pulling them together so he could keep Hyungwon contained. “He’s fine.”

“But it itches,” Hyungwon mumbled in a voice Hyunwoo thought only Kihyun and Minhyuk were supposed to hear, and he couldn’t restrain a small smile.

“Because you kept scratching at it,” Kihyun said, sounding increasingly frustrated.

“He can’t help it,” Minhyuk spoke up, making Hyunwoo think that maybe he was older than Hyungwon if he was stepping in to defend him.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” Hyunwoo asked, and all three kids looked over at him as though they’d forgotten his presence.

“You can leave,” Kihyun said sharply. That seemed to be his attitude about everything, so Hyunwoo didn’t feel quite as rebuked as earlier. “We don’t talk to cops.”

“Right,” Minhyuk piped in.

Hyunwoo just tried not to chuckle. “Okay, good luck,” he said with a wave before walking away. He heard some more general bickering between the three of them before the sound of another can rattling against the blacktop echoed through the area.

\--

His afternoon round was uneventful. He took another walk around, but the Walour Motel parking lot was empty. Either they knew he’d stop by again and wanted to avoid him, or it had gotten too hot for them to gather on the blacktop, which had been soaking up the sun’s heat all day and was nearly sizzling. If Hyunwoo laid down some strips of beef, he could probably have his own personal barbequing session right here.

Still, he hoped he would run into the kids again on Wednesday. They were the only people in quadrant four who had talked to him for a little bit at least. Most of the residents nearby just gave him cold stares.

 _Wednesday_ , he told himself, making a mental note to pick up something for the trip.

\--

Hyungwon and Minhyuk were squatting on the blacktop when he strolled by on Wednesday, peering down at something on the ground, when Hyungwon looked up and waved at him.

Minhyuk elbowed him in the side, causing Hyungwon to curl up and fall over onto the blacktop, holding his side so Minhyuk couldn’t jab him again. “We’re not supposed to talk to cops. That’s what Kihyun said.”

“But I didn’t say anything, I just waved,” Hyungwon complained with a sour expression.

“I’m not here to talk,” Hyunwoo said, deciding to just go with what the kids decided. “I just wanted to drop something off,” he said, holding up a small bag in his hand and setting it on the fence so the loose wires on top held it up on their side.

“What is it?” Hyungwon asked, openly curious. Minhyuk just bit down on his lip, tapping his foot nervously like he wanted to grab it but was worried that Kihyun would suddenly appear and yell at him.

“It’s just a little something I picked up for your arms,” Hyunwoo said, taking a few steps away from the fence to seem less threatening if one of the boys wanted to grab it. “You don’t have to take it if you don’t want it. I just happened to see it on my way here today and thought you could use it.”

“We can’t give you money for it, whatever it is,” Minhyuk said adamantly as though this would change Hyunwoo’s mind.

It didn’t. “That’s fine, I don’t want any money. It wasn’t very expensive anyway, I promise.”

Minhyuk hopped back and forth between both feet, shifting his weight easily like an easily excitable rabbit. After a few more seconds of deliberation, he bounded forward, snatched the bag from the fence, and returned to the curb that was lined with their empty cans.

Several small scraps of the plastic bag had torn free when he’d yanked it from the fence, and they fluttered leisurely to the ground as Minhyuk opened the bag from the other side of the parking lot.

“Hydro...hydrocor...”

“Hydrocortisone,” Hyunwoo offered up, approaching the fence once more. “It’s a cream that’s supposed to soothe dry skin. Hyungwon can put it on his arms, and they shouldn’t itch anymore. But you have to put it on every day for it to work, at least until the rash goes away.”

Hyungwon looked surprised, but Minhyuk just squinted at all the tiny writing on the packaging, trying to sound out the chemicals.

“Hey,” came a shout from side of the parking lot adjacent to the motel as Kihyun trotted over, the left side of his face red as though the skin had been pinched recently. But the mark was too big for a pinch. Hyunwoo’s smile faded. “What’s that you’ve got there?” he asked Minhyuk before swiping the tube out of Minhyuk’s hands.

“It’s hydrocortisone,” Minhyuk explained, showing off his newly learned word. “It’s a cream that’ll fix Hyungwon’s arms.”

“Where’d you get this?” Kihyun asked, frowning as he looked over at Minhyuk. “Whose money did you take?”

“No one’s!” Minhyuk denied immediately. “Officer Hyunwoo gave it to us for free. He said so,” Minhyuk said, pointing to Hyunwoo, who Kihyun hadn’t yet seen.

His gaze snapped to meet Hyunwoo’s, and Hyunwoo took a step back, immediately seeing that he’d overstepped.

“We don’t want whatever this is!” Kihyun yelled, throwing the tube of hydrocortisone toward Hyunwoo. It clattered against the fence and fell to the ground on their side of the lot.

“Hey...” Minhyuk said, sounding less certain now. “That was for Hyungwon.”

“You don’t take anything from other people, even if they say it’s free,” Kihyun said, still glaring at Hyunwoo, who stood still, not wanting to pose a greater threat. “Nothing is ever free.”

“I just wanted to help Hyungwon,” Hyunwoo said slowly. He realized that he’d been stupid to just try and help them. Some people didn’t want to be helped. And they didn’t trust him, which was how it should be. If he had kids, he wouldn’t want them taking medicinal items from strangers. But it was hard to see a problem and not want to fix it when he had both the money and means to do so.

“We take care of Hyungwon,” Kihyun said. “Not you. So take your hydro-whatever and stay away.”

“Hey,” Minhyuk said again, tugging at Kihyun’s shirt. “It’s supposed to help Hyungwon,” he said, setting his jaw stubbornly. “He bought it for Hyungwon, so Hyungwon should get to decide if he wants to keep it.”

Hyungwon looked back and forth between the two of them with worried eyes. It was clear that whoever made the decision, it wouldn’t be him.

“How about I just leave it here,” Hyunwoo called out, disrupting their argument because he didn’t want them to fight over something he’d done on a foolish whim. “And if Hyungwon decides he wants it, it’ll be right here.” He gave them a wave and walked away to show them that he really didn’t want anything in return and that what they did with the hydrocortisone was up to them.

The three kids watched him as he left, and he could feel their eyes tracing him as he left the neighborhood.

\--

Hyunwoo decided to avoid the Walour Motel on his second loop that day because he didn’t want to anger Kihyun any further, but when he went on his Friday morning rounds, he was happy to see that the hydrocortisone had disappeared from beside the fence.

Even though he heard the clanking of cans from down the neighborhood, he’d already decided to just keep on walking past the motel, but he was stopped by a yell from across the parking lot.

“Hey!”

It was Kihyun. Hyunwoo winced and turned, fully ready to apologize for overstepping his boundaries, but Kihyun didn’t look mad, just confused.

He didn’t approach the fence, but he neared it, staying a few meters back. “How did you know that cream would help Hyungwon?”

Hyunwoo took a few seconds to respond since he’d been caught off guard. “Oh, I just- I had a little eczema when I was younger, and that’s what my mom did for me.”

“Oh.” Kihyun was quiet for a moment before he met Hyunwoo’s gaze again, his head tilted as though he were trying to figure Hyunwoo out. Maybe, to Kihyun, kindness was a mysterious virtue. “Well, he says thanks. It made his arms stop itching. For now, at least. It usually gets worse in the winter for him.”

Hyunwoo just nodded, not wanting to say too much and overstep again. “Well, I’m glad to hear that it’s working. Make sure he applies it every day so it doesn’t hurt again.”

“Yeah, okay.” Kihyun waited a beat before turning back and hurrying over to the other boys, who watched Hyunwoo with open curiosity but didn’t speak up.

“Bye!” Kihyun yelled as Hyunwoo turned to leave.

Again, he was caught off guard, but he just gave a wave and went on his way.

\--

A month passed while Hyunwoo switched to patrolling quadrant one, then two and three. Finally, he was back on rotation for quadrant four. He was weirdly excited about it because he hadn’t really gotten close to any of the other residents in the area. He had looked forward to patrolling quadrant four for weeks.

“Good morning,” Hyunwoo called out, stopping outside the fence and hoping they hadn’t forgotten about him in the past month. He shouldn’t be surprised if they had, but it would be nice if someone remembered him.

“It’s the nice officer!” Minhyuk announced with one of his iconic wide grins. Kihyun and Hyungwon looked up from where they were sprawled down on the blacktop, stomachs flush with the ground.

“What are you guys doing?” Hyunwoo asked, genuinely curious.

“We’re watching this one caterpillar,” Minhyuk said.

“When you watch it from ground level, it’s really neat,” Hyungwon said. It was hard for Hyunwoo to see clearly from the fence, but it looked like the insides of his elbows were less red. Hopefully the eczema had been ameliorated by the cream.

“What are you doing here?” Kihyun asked, rolling over onto his back and sticking his arms behind his neck like the parking lot was his personal office.

“I’m on rotation for this neighborhood. I have to rotate every week, though, so I’m only here for one week a month.” Hyunwoo realized that it was sort of odd for him to be explaining his work schedule to these kids, but he had been looking forward to seeing them again. Maybe he wanted them to look forward to seeing him, too.

“Only one week a month?” Kihyun repeated, frowning. Hyunwoo didn’t know if that meant Kihyun was upset that Hyunwoo couldn’t visit more often, or if they just disliked the other officers more than him.

“Sorry,” Hyunwoo said even though it was a pointless apology. It wasn’t like he could change the schedule.

“That’s fine,” Kihyun said after a moment as though having decided that Hyunwoo’s schedule fit his needs.

“Did you bring us anything today?” Minhyuk piped up hopefully, and Kihyun reached out to smack his leg.

“Shut up, Minhyuk. Just cause he brought Hyungwon something last time doesn’t mean he’s going to buy you things every time he comes by.”

Hyunwoo hesitated, taking in how thin the boys were. He hardly remembered growing up, but he knew he’d never struggled to get food. “I usually come by again in the afternoon. I can bring something then?”

“Yay!” Minhyuk cheered and a rosy smile lit up Hyungwon’s face while Kihyun glared at the two of them.

“Hey! I just told you two that-”

“It’s okay, Kihyun,” Hyunwoo said with a smile. “I was going to get something to eat later anyway. Do you guys have any requests?”

“Chocolate!” Minhyuk shouted.

“Ice cream!” Hyungwon said, sitting up in his excitement and forgetting all about the caterpillar they’d been tracking.

“Wait a second,” Kihyun said to Hyunwoo before conferring with the other two in a whispered huddle. After a minute he looked back over at Hyunwoo, the other two looking slightly disappointed. “Bread and a jar of peanut butter, please. And a plastic knife. That’s it.”

Hyunwoo hesitated. The idea of young kids having to choose between a special snack and whether or not they got to eat a real meal that day was foreign to him and incredibly sad. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said, not wanting to get their hopes up, but he hoped he could do better than peanut butter sandwiches.

“Thank you nice officer!” Minhyuk cheered, and Hyungwon gasped, wrapping his arms around Minhyuk before he could put his hand back down on the blacktop.

“You almost smushed the caterpillar!”

\--

Hyunwoo slung the bag over the fence like before and stepped back so Kihyun could come over and grab it. He said a quick thanks before bringing the bag back over to the other kids, and they huddled around it like they were afraid someone would see and take it away from them. Maybe someone would try, but not while Hyunwoo was standing at the fence. At least, he hoped not.

“Chocolate!” Minhyuk gushed, snagging a chocolate bar from the bag just as Hyungwon reached in and delicately pulled out a plastic-wrapped ice cream bar that was already dripping with condensation.

Kihyun pulled out a packet of M&Ms and stared at it for a long moment.

“I’m sorry, Kihyun,” Hyunwoo said. “I wasn’t sure what you liked, so I grabbed that. But I can get something else if you’d like.”

“This is fine,” Kihyun said, still staring at them before tucking them away into one of his many pockets. He pulled out the bread that they’d requested and slathered peanut butter on a slice before folding it in half and giving it to Hyungwon. Then he did the same for Minhyuk, and finally himself. Hyunwoo got the feeling like he was trying to make the bread last as long as possible.

“Thank you!” Minhyuk yelled, easily the loudest of the three.

Hyungwon laughed softly and echoed his thanks.

“Thank you,” Kihyun said, staring down at the sandwich before biting into it.

Hyunwoo gave them a wave and started walking away, not wanting them to feel like they owed him anything for a simple snack run, but once again, Kihyun’s voice stopped him in his tracks.

“Wait! Are you coming back on Wednesday?” He was standing almost at the fence, watching Hyunwoo with anxious eyes. But then he seemed to realize how vulnerable he sounded, and he took a step back, eyes hardening. “I just like to know when things are happening,” he said, sticking his hands in his pockets and frowning, his shoulders hunching up defensively.

Hyunwoo smiled. “Yes, I’ll be back Wednesday. In the morning and in the afternoon.”

“Okay then.”

“Okay,” Hyunwoo agreed before giving a last wave and walking down the block. He was still glowing slightly from the happiness he’d taken in seeing them eagerly dive into the bag and how they’d treasured the food, but he wondered if there were other hungry kids in this area. Who was taking care of them?

Troubled, he continued his walk, taking care to bypass intersections that would lead him next to congregations of teens. Quadrant four or not, Jooheon had warned him yet again of the high volume of drug transactions in the area.

He could only hope that the kids in the lot wouldn’t get caught up in that.

\--

“You’re on quadrant four this week, right?” Jooheon asked the next day, pushing back in his rolly chair so he could look over at Hyunwoo.

“Uh huh.”

“How’s it going?” Jooheon asked, tapping his finger against the armrest. “Any activity at the motel?”

Hyunwoo shook his head. “Nothing illegal. At least, nothing in plain view. Usually, I just see the same three kids playing out in the lot, nobody else.”

“Probably inside getting high,” Jooheon said, seeming to sink back into his chair, distressed by the thought. “Who’re the kids though?”

“Kihyun, Hyungwon, and Minhyuk. Kihyun’s maybe fifteen, and Hyungwon and Minhyuk are a few years younger, I think.”

“Huh.” Jooheon tilted his head lightly, back at it with the tapping. “Well, keep an eye on them.”

“Why?” Hyunwoo asked, sort of surprised to hear Jooheon’s advice. “They’re kids. You don’t really think they’re running heroin or cocaine for someone, do you?”

Jooheon was quiet for a moment while he pondered the question. “Maybe not,” he agreed after a moment, “but if they aren’t running drugs now, they will be in a few years.”

The thought was horrifying to Hyunwoo, but he understood it well enough. Minors received lesser charges than adults did. Still, he’d seen that light of childhood innocence in all their eyes. He couldn’t see them ever participating in that sort of a thing.

“I’ll keep an eye out,” Hyunwoo said to appease Jooheon, “but they’re good kids.”

Jooheon just nodded but didn’t look over.


	3. Chapter 3

> _“My lungs are thick with the smoke of your absence.”_
> 
> _― Raymond Carver, Where Water Comes Together with Other Water: Poems_

Hyunwoo walked along the neighborhood, hands in his pockets. A month had passed but he was finally back in quadrant four, which meant he’d probably get to say hi to his tiny friends today.

Only when he paused outside the fence of the Walour Motel, there was just one kid in the lot.

“Hey,” Hyunwoo greeted, a little thrown off by the absence of the trio’s other members.

Kihyun, who was sitting on the far curb and poking at the cracking blacktop with a stick, looked up, his frown never changing.

“Where are Hyungwon and Minhyuk?” Hyunwoo asked, unsure if Kihyun was angry or tired or hungry or just his normal self. He’d be happy to leave, if that was what Kihyun wanted, but the boy seemed sort of sad.

Kihyun just shrugged in answer to his question. “I dunno. Gone,” he muttered, poking again with the stick. It made a light scraping sound as he dragged it over the rough surface, and it cut off abruptly when he looked back up at Hyunwoo.

“Gone where?”

“I dunno,” he said again, dropping the stick. It clattered against the ground before stilling, and then his hands were empty. They fiddled anxiously with his pockets. “I haven’t seen them in a while.”

Hyunwoo opened his mouth before hesitating. He could just give Kihyun some space, but everything about today felt wrong. Maybe he’d bother Kihyun for a while longer. “How long?”

Kihyun’s shoulders hunched up, fell back down. His head tipped forward, unruly hair hiding his eyes. “Two weeks, maybe.”

Hyunwoo’s pulse took off, but he tried to reason with himself. Maybe, in this sort of neighborhood, that sort of thing happened. Perhaps people moved around or disappeared for a while. But it wasn’t normal to him. “Does that happen a lot?”

Kihyun looked back up, and his eyes were sort of watery, like he’d gotten dust in them, or maybe like he was on the verge of crying. “No,” he said, his voice rough now, scraping against his throat like the stick against the blacktop. “It doesn’t.”

Hyunwoo opened his mouth to ask more questions when he heard one of the residents shouting down from a balcony. “Hey! Kihyun! Who’re you talking to?” The voice, rough in a way that belied a lifetime of smoking, belonged to a middle-aged woman with wrinkles beyond her years and frizzy hair that hung around her pinched face like an electron cloud.

“Nobody, Ma,” Kihyun yelled back up, kicking his foot against the ground.

“You’s talking to _someb’y_ ,” she said, lifting a cigarette up to her lips with shaky hands before speaking again. “Who’s you talking to?”

“I told you, nobody,” Kihyun repeated. “Just myself.”

“Fine,” she said, tapping the cigarette against the balcony railing. A few ashes fell off the end and were caught up by the breeze. “Betta not be lyin’ to me.”

“I wouldn’t lie to you, Ma,” Kihyun said again, and after a second, the woman disappeared inside the apartment and the balcony door shut behind her.

Hyunwoo, who had tucked himself behind a part of the fence that was draped over with ivy and weeds, peeked out, but Kihyun motioned for him to go away. “Later,” he mouthed.

Hyunwoo nodded, not wanting to get Kihyun in trouble, but his mind was preoccupied as he continued on with his patrol. He’d put in a call to the station, see if Jooheon or any of the others on patrol had seen anything.

He hoped Kihyun could tell him more this afternoon.

\--

“Nobody noticed anything?” Hyunwoo repeated, shocked by Jooheon’s answer. He was sitting in his squad car, having immediately called his partner up once he’d finished his patrol, which had been much faster than normal in an effort to figure out what had happened.

“No, I just checked with the other three guys who patrol that sector when you’re not there, and they didn’t notice anything unusual. They don’t remember if the kids were in the lot or not. I’m sorry, Hyunwoo.”

“Can’t be helped,” Hyunwoo said after a moment, frustrated nonetheless that two young boys had been missing for two weeks and nobody else had noticed. “Look, Jooheon, I’m worried.”

“And you’re sure this isn’t just a misunderstanding? Maybe they relocated or-”

“It’s not,” Hyunwoo said. He winced at hearing how terse he sounded, but he had no patience at the moment. Something was wrong; couldn’t anybody else see that?

“Okay,” Jooheon agreed softly. “I’m sorry, Hyunwoo, but you know I have to ask.”

“I know, I get it,” Hyunwoo said, exhaling through his teeth. “I’m just- I’m worried, that’s all. Kihyun - that’s the other boy who was there today – he sounded worried too. I think something happened, Jooheon. I think the boys are legitimately missing.”

Jooheon’s line was silent for a moment as he pondered their next step. “Have you talked to the boys’ parents?” he finally asked.

“No, not yet,” Hyunwoo said, followed by another exhale. He felt stupid. Of course he should have just asked the parents and cleared this whole thing up before stirring up a panic about what was more than likely nothing particularly unusual.

“Well, I’d have a word with them, but don’t expect too much,” Jooheon advised after a moment.

“What do you mean?”

“Not everyone in that district is a gold star parent,” Jooheon said dryly. “Some of those kids have probably been fending for themselves since they were born. And I doubt they’ll even talk with you. They’re not big on cops.”

Hyunwoo just nodded since he didn’t really know how else to take that information, but then he realized that he was on a call so of course Jooheon couldn’t see him. “If I talk to their parents and they’re really missing, then what do we do? I mean, do you know offhand if stuff like this has happened around here before?”

Jooheon was quiet on the other end of the line. “There have been...similar cases, in that quadrant specifically. Sometimes it’s drugs. They need new runners or kids get dragged in too deep.”

“And the other times?”

There was a soft shuffling that Hyunwoo insinuated was the shaking of a head. “A few girls have gone missing before, but this doesn’t really match those cases. Different target demographic.”

“All right,” Hyunwoo said, trusting that Jooheon would give him any information that would be helpful. He worried at his lip; he hoped the kids hadn’t gotten caught up in any drug operations. They didn’t seem like the type to do so, but in the end, how well did he really know them? He saw them, at most, half a dozen times a month. He didn’t know anything about them except their first names. Maybe it was wrong of him to get so invested, but he couldn’t help it. “I’ll double back, talk to the parents, Kihyun too if he’s out. I’ll fill you in then.”

“Got it. Keep in touch,” Jooheon said, and then the call went dead.

Hyunwoo grimaced. Even if it made him out to be the fool, he hoped that it was all just a simple misunderstanding. That would at least mean that the boys were safe.

He left his car earlier than normal for his afternoon rounds and headed straight to the Walour Motel.

\--

Kihyun wasn’t yet out in the lot, which made sense since Hyunwoo was earlier than usual. He headed straight through the main entrance and to the service desk, where he flashed his badge and explained that he needed to speak with Hyungwon’s and Minhyuk’s parents.

“Is there a problem, Officer?” the employee asked with narrowed eyes.

Hyunwoo assumed that if he were to say there was, then he’d be kindly shepherded out of the motel with no shortage of excuses as to why they were unavailable. So he tried to be as candid as possible. “Nobody’s in trouble. I’m just worried about the boys’ safety, and so I have to ask them a few questions.”

The employee still looked hesitant, so Hyunwoo continued on.

“Look, you don’t even have to show me to their apartments. If you can just ask them to meet me here in the lobby, that would be fine. I just need to have a quick chat with them and verify that everybody’s okay.” He didn’t want to say that they were missing because if the employee knew where the boys were and that they were involved in something illegal, she’d likely clam up even further.

“Fine,” she answered after a long moment. “I’ll call and ask them if they’d like to speak with you.” She hesitated, hand on the phone. “Just so I’m clear, is this a mandatory conversation? Are they going to be arrested if they don’t talk with you?”

Hyunwoo shook his head, tucking his hands in his pockets to seem less threatening. Even though he had a young face, the badge was intimidating to some people, especially those who had had poor previous experiences with law enforcement. “They don’t have to talk with me if they don’t want to, but I promise I’m only here because I’m worried about the kids. I would appreciate if they could spare a few minutes. I’m sure nothing’s wrong, but I’d just like to confirm that with them in person. Otherwise, a lot more people might show up and start asking questions.” He hadn’t wanted to resort to that subtle threat at the end, but for people who valued their privacy and weren’t on particularly friendly terms with the police, he figured that they’d welcome the chance to keep it that way.

“All right,” she answered before pointing him toward the chairs in the lobby and picking up the phone.

The chairs were old and red and looked like they’d been plucked from a garage sale, but upon sitting down in one, he found them to be surprisingly comfortable and sturdy. He only had to wait a few minutes before a reedy woman and a stocky man stepped out of the dingy elevator.

Hyunwoo immediately got to his feet, inclining his head respectfully. “Thank you for your time today. Are either of you Hyungwon’s or Minhyuk’s parents?”

“Minhyuk is our son,” the woman said before casting a quick glance over at her partner. He stood several feet behind her, his stony face giving Hyunwoo the impression that he wasn’t here to talk, just to make sure that too much talking didn’t happen. “I don’t know about Hyungwon’s mom. Maybe she was...busy.”

She didn’t want to talk to him, Hyunwoo guessed. Which was fine, at least he’d gotten someone to talk to. “Mrs. ...I’m sorry, I don’t know your last name. How should I address you?”

She seemed startled to have been asked the question, and she sent another quick look over at her husband as though seeking permission before she pulled nervously on a strand of hair. “Lee. You can call me Mrs. Lee. That’s fine.”

Hyunwoo risked a small smile. He’d read somewhere that some animals viewed baring teeth as aggressive, so he tried not to show too much. “Mr. and Mrs. Lee, thanks for taking the time to talk with me today. I’m worried about Minhyuk.”

“Minhyukkie?” she asked, pulling on the same tuft of hair again. One of the strands broke off, and she stared at it before pulling it off her finger and stretching it between her hands, snapping at the ends to pull it taut. “What about him?”

“Ma’am, have you seen him lately? I’m sorry if this seems invasive to ask,” Hyunwoo hurried on, noticing that the man in the corner seemed to be growing less content with each passing second. “I just haven’t seen him around, and I usually see him when I pass through this area.”

“He wasn’t there?” she asked, pulling at the hair again. It snapped in the middle, and the halves fell onto the carpet below. She resumed pulling at the tuft. “He’s usually out playing with the other kids, I don’t know.”

“When was the last time you saw him?” Hyunwoo pressed.

She bit at her inside cheek, eyes skittering across the lobby wall and to her husband before continuing their anxious wandering. “I don’t...I don’t know. A bit. You know how kids are.”

Hyunwoo knew how kids were, and he knew that not knowing when you’d seen your own kid last wasn’t a good sign. “Does he disappear like this a lot?”

“I don’t know,” she said again, looking behind her to her husband, seemingly wanting him to speak up so she didn’t have to decide what to say.

“Boys will be boys,” he said, changing neither the cold look in his eyes nor the crossing of his arms.

Clearly he didn’t want to speak to Hyunwoo, but was it because something illegal was going on? Or did they genuinely not know where Minhyuk was?

Would they have even thought to ask if he hadn’t shown up?

“All right,” he said after a minute, inferring from the attitude of the room that their pleasant chat was over. “I just wanted to let you know that I’m trying to find Minhyuk and make sure that he’s safe. The same goes for Hyungwon, so if either of you or Hyungwon’s mom hear or think of anything that might be helpful, please contact me,” he said before pulling out a business card with his cell phone number and handing it to the woman.

She took it with a shaky hand, immediately looking over at her husband to see if she was allowed to accept it, but he didn’t give any inclination.

She bobbed a quick nod at Hyunwoo, slipping the card into hidden recess in her baggy shirt, and then the two were back on the elevator, disappearing out of Hyunwoo’s sight.

He sighed and left the building with a nod of thanks to the service desk employee who looked altogether too pleased to see him go.

Feeling a bit let down after not finding out anything conclusive, he swung around to the back and was relieved to see Kihyun out in the lot. He was about to call out when Kihyun threw a finger to his lips, shushing Hyunwoo, and checked over his shoulder before smoothly scaling the fence and hopping over onto Hyunwoo’s side.

“I can’t be seen talking to you,” Kihyun said, his tone urgent and eyes serious. “They won’t like it.”

“Who, your mom?”

“My mom, and everyone else. We don’t talk to cops.”

That had been the first thing Kihyun had said to him, Hyunwoo recalled. And it was no surprise to him that the community would frown upon it. But Kihyun was the best source of information he had right now.

“I understand. I don’t want to jeopardize your safety, Kihyun,” Hyunwoo said, wanting to make it clear to Kihyun that he had a choice in this matter.

“There isn’t any other option,” Kihyun said, clenching his hands and unclenching them. “You’re a cop. If they’re really missing, you can find them, can’t you?”

Hyunwoo hesitated. He was afraid of making Kihyun a promise that he wouldn’t be able to keep, but those were certainly his intentions. “Kihyun, I want you to know that I’m taking this issue very seriously. I’m going to do my best to find them. But first, I need to know...” He hesitated, not wanting to break the fragile trust they’d built up. “Kihyun, are Hyungwon and Minhyuk involved in anything that’s illegal? Something that might explain where they’ve gone?”

“No,” Kihyun answered immediately. He looked frustrated to have been asked, but he didn’t seem to be lying. “I know you probably think they’re running heroin for someone or whatever, but they’re not. Whatever happened to them isn’t their fault.”

“All right,” Hyunwoo said, nodding. He was content with Kihyun’s answer, and maybe he just wanted to believe it because that’s what he’d been hoping to hear, but it was good enough for now. “I know it’s hard to answer these questions, so thank you, Kihyun.”

The boy just nodded. “So are you going to look for them now?” He looked up at Hyunwoo with a combination of desperation and hope in his eyes, and Hyunwoo felt nearly sick with the weight of expectation.

“I will,” Hyunwoo promised. Maybe he didn’t say it was a promise, but he meant it. Even if nobody else looked into the boys’ disappearance, he was going to, and he would do his best to bring them home. “Thanks for telling me, Kihyun.”

Kihyun just gave a weak nod. “I didn’t want to,” he said quietly. “We don’t talk to cops.” He repeated the words as though they were a mantra he’d been told since birth, and that was probably true for the most part. “But if I didn’t tell you,” he continued, looking up with a helpless expression on his face, “nobody would’ve. And that means nobody would be out there looking for them.”

Hyunwoo took in the sadness in his eyes, and something darker, something that alluded to Kihyun’s pain at having betrayed what he believed to be a rule of his own community. “I’m going to find them,” Hyunwoo said, making the promise he’d been hesitant to do before. Not just for the boys’ sake, but for Kihyun’s too, to thank him for being the only one brave enough to speak up.

“Go back inside,” Hyunwoo instructed, already turning back to his squad car. He had more urgent things to do than finish a patrol. “Don’t tell anybody you talked with me. If you can, meet me out here tomorrow morning.”

Kihyun nodded and turned, lodging his foot in the diamond formed by four wires to boost himself up over the fence, whereupon he swung a leg over and jumped down. Hyunwoo felt him watching him for a few moments longer before his gaze disappeared.

\--

“They’re missing.”

“You heard from the parents?” Jooheon asked.

“No. Well, yes, but nothing definitive. They can’t say the last time they saw him, and they can’t tell me if this is normal behavior.”

“So how can you be certain?”

Hyunwoo grew quiet, picturing Kihyun’s face in his mind once more. He’d mentally stored the image to drive him onward because he wasn’t going to let Kihyun down. “I just know. I’ve got a gut feeling about this, Jooheon.” Which was weird, since before transferring to this station, he’d never really had a gut feeling about anything. “Something’s wrong. We need to find those boys.”

“All right.” There was no hesitation on Jooheon’s end, no doubt, and Hyunwoo appreciated the confidence Jooheon had in him and his hunch. “Where should we start?”

“I’m not sure,” Hyunwoo admitted. “Kihyun was adamant that neither of the two boys was involved in any drug transactions.”

“And you believe him?” Not an accusatory question, just a question.

“I do.”

“All right,” Jooheon said again, moving forward. “So let’s assume for now that it’s not drugs. Let’s make the assumption that they were either taken by force or lured away from the motel. What does someone have to gain by taking two kids, if not for the drug trade?”

“There’s dozens of reasons,” Hyunwoo said, and his stomach coiled up as he began listing each horrible thought, one after another. “They could be sold to someone else. Some places run stings where they abduct kids and sell them off as ‘kids for adoption’ to some other unwitting family. Then there’s the prospect of forced labor. Trafficking of various natures. Dark organizations that use kids for medical purposes – for organ transplants, blood transfusions, bone marrow, stem cells...”

“So there’s a lot of fish in the sea,” Jooheon summed up. “It’s hard to tell if there are similar cases because not a lot of these sorts of things get reported in that neighborhood. So it seems like our next step is trying to figure out if anyone unusual was making contact with them prior to their disappearance.”

“I can talk to Kihyun tomorrow,” Hyunwoo said, still feeling sick thinking about all the things that could have happened. “But until then, I don’t know what else to run on. Maybe I’ll come back to the station and start combing through the databases, see if I run into anything similar or anything that stands out.”

“That’s as good of a place as any for the time being,” Jooheon said. “I’ll ask around too and see if anyone’s heard of anything. And I’ll check back in with the guys patrolling the last two weeks and see why the hell they didn’t notice anything.”

Hyunwoo let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. “Thanks, Jooheon.” He was still sort of upset at them too, even if he didn’t have any real reason to be. There were lots of reasons why they wouldn’t have noticed. If they drove around instead of walked, then they’d probably never even talked to the boys. If all they’d been looking for was illegal activity, then they wouldn’t have even stopped.

But still. Part of Hyunwoo was wondering, if he’d been patrolling two weeks ago instead of someone else, if this all would’ve happened.

\--

His research turned up nothing concrete, so his next move was to return to the Walour Motel the next morning to have another chat with Kihyun.

Kihyun was already out in the lot when he walked by, and he came by the fence, keeping his back to the apartment balconies so no one would see that he was talking. “Did you find out anything?”

“Not yet,” Hyunwoo said, hating the way Kihyun’s shoulders sagged in disappointment. “I came to ask you some more questions.”

“I don’t know where they went,” Kihyun said, clearly frustrated that Hyunwoo seemed to be repeating the same questions from before.

“I know, I believe you,” Hyunwoo reassured, making sure to keep his voice down so no one came outside. “But I think you might know things that maybe you don’t even realize are important. Like did you notice anyone unusual hanging around in the last few weeks? Anyone you didn’t recognize?”

Kihyun shook his head. “No strangers except you.”

It was clearly an attempt at humor, so Hyunwoo gave a small smile, but neither of them felt very comical at the moment. “All right, so no outsiders. But was anyone hanging around Hyungwon and Minhyuk? Try to think back.”

Kihyun’s eyes edged upward toward the sky while he ran back through his memory. “Nobody I can remember.” He frowned after a moment as though he’d recalled something unpleasant, but he shook his head.

“What is it?” Hyunwoo asked.

“Just a guy,” Kihyun said. “He’s not a stranger, he’s from around here.”

“And he was hanging around Hyungwon and Minhyuk?”

Kihyun shrugged. “It’s not like he’s new. He shows up now and then. He’s a few years older than use – maybe nineteenish? – and sometimes he brings snacks or cans of pop and stuff.”

Hyunwoo’s newfound gut instincts were very interested in this information. “How long have you known this guy?”

Kihyun shrugged again. “I don’t know. He’s just sort of always been around, him and some of the older guys.”

“But you don’t like him?” Hyunwoo asked, trying to read Kihyun’s body language.

Kihyun gave yet another evasive shrug. “He’s fine.”

“But?”

Kihyun looked at Hyunwoo, eyes searching Hyunwoo’s for something. Hyunwoo couldn’t tell if Kihyun found what he was looking for. “I don’t know. I just never really liked him. I don’t trust people who give stuff away for free. Nothing’s free.”

Hyunwoo nodded slowly. It made sense to him why someone like Kihyun had so thoroughly distrusted him in the beginning when he’d brought Hyungwon cream for his eczema or when he’d bought them snacks. “So you don’t trust him. Did Hyungwon and Minhyuk?”

Kihyun shrugged and looked down at the blacktop, dragging the toe of his sneaker along one particularly long and linear crack. “I guess. Sometimes you’re too hungry to think about stuff like that.” He got quiet after a moment. “I told them not to meet with him and those guys unless I was there, but maybe they did. Maybe they got into something.”

“You did your best,” Hyunwoo assured him, not wanting Kihyun to feel guilty, but the boy looked up with a frown nonetheless.

“Really?” he asked. “Did I? They’re missing, aren’t they? Clearly I didn’t do my best. Or if I did, then my best is pretty shitty.”

“Kihyun-”

“I have to go in,” Kihyun said, turning abruptly before looking over his shoulder at Hyunwoo. “I don’t know his full name, but everyone just calls him Hendy.”


	4. Chapter 4

> _“All of us, all of us, all of us trying to save our immortal souls, some ways seemingly more round about and mysterious than others. We are having a good time here. But hope all will be revealed soon.”_
> 
> _― Raymond Carver, All of Us: The Collected Poems_

“And you’re positive he said ‘Hendy’?” Jooheon asked, although the name was clearly unique enough to not be confused with another.

“Yes. Why? Does that mean something to you?” Hyunwoo asked, having once again immediately called Jooheon to update him from the squad car.

“It means we’re in deep shit,” Jooheon said with a sigh.

“Why’s that?”

“Because Hendy and some of the guys he hangs around with are involved with a lot of bad people,” Jooheon said, and there was a staccato tapping in the background that Hyunwoo could make out, maybe a pen or a fingernail. “They’re middlemen, basically. If somebody needs something acquired, they’re the people who can make it happen. We’ve busted them countless times but can’t make anything stick because there’s no real transaction history. The only way we’d be able to get them dead to rights is if we had a video of the money being handed over, but we’ve never been able to get close enough.” There was a pause. “I just emailed you a photo of him.”

Hyunwoo pulled the phone away from his ear only long enough to see the notification ribbon appear. “When you say ‘acquire,’ what exactly are you talking about? Drugs? Guns?” Hyunwoo hesitated. “Kids?”

Jooheon’s sigh was long and not particularly inspiring. “It’s hard to know concretely, but none of those would surprise me.”

“So we have to find Hendy,” Hyunwoo said. “And somehow convince him to tell us where he took the kids.”

“If he took the kids,” Jooheon corrected. “I know you want to run into this headlong, but just remember that we have literally no evidence to run on here, just hearsay from a minor, and that we have no leverage over Hendy. Even if he had a part in this, he’s got no reason to turn over the information.”

That was a devastating thought to Hyunwoo, that they might be so close to someone who could tell them and not be able to get their answers. “What can we do, then?”

Jooheon was quiet while he thought. Finally, “I’ll ask around. Maybe another officer in a different department has something on Hendy that we can use. It’s a long shot, but they may have been saving some leverage to get a bigger fish. I’m hoping they’ll forget about the bigger fish in lieu of a few missing kids.”

“I hope so too,” Hyunwoo said, because if they refused, he thought he might just lose all faith he had in law enforcement. “Call me back when you hear something,” he said. “I’m going to keep driving around. Maybe I’ll spot Hendy.”

“Don’t pick him up until you hear back from me,” Jooheon warned.

Hyunwoo hung up.

\--

Referencing the photo Jooheon had sent him, Hyunwoo drove around quadrant four, keeping an eye out for Hendy. Either Jooheon would get back to him with leverage, or Hyunwoo would stumble upon Hendy and figure out something on the spot.

He was hoping Jooheon would call back first.

As luck would have it, though, Hyunwoo spotted someone matching Hendy’s description loitering outside a local gas station with four other guys. There were plenty of cigarettes and a bottle of vodka to go around. Once the bottle was empty, one of the guys threw it to the ground, and they laughed when the glass shattered. Hyunwoo stayed in the car, parking further down the road so he could keep an eye on Hendy. He didn’t want to move in without Jooheon’s call. Not yet.

He stayed in position, and some thirty-odd minutes later, several members of the group detached themselves and peeled away from the gas station, leaving Hendy and one other guy. They started walking, and Hyunwoo quietly pulled out of the parking lot he’d been sitting in. He idled in the street for a moment before switching into drive just as a call came in.

He checked the caller ID. “Tell me you have something.”

“You may hereafter refer to me as the dentist,” Jooheon said with a bit of panache in his voice.

“And why’s that?” Hyunwoo asked, driving slow and keeping an eye on the figures that were about half a mile down the road from him.

“Because I spent all morning pulling teeth, for fuck’s sake,” Jooheon said. “Pricks didn’t want to hand anything over, and it took begging and a little bit of chocolate bribery as well as a promise for a favor to be cashed in at any given future time.”

“But you got it?” Hyunwoo asked.

“You sound neither impressed nor particularly sympathetic to my woes.”

“Great, I’m picking him up now,” Hyunwoo said, cutting off the call before Jooheon could protest and tell him what a horrible idea it was.

\--

“I didn’t do nothin” were Hendy’s first words when Jooheon and Hyunwoo sat across from him at the metal table in the interrogation room.

“I would _love_ to believe you,” Jooheon said with a thousand-watt smile. “Only, there’s this trippy little thing called a surveillance camera, and it sort of disagrees with that.” Jooheon leaned forward, elbows planted solidly on the table. “We have footage of you breaking into a liquor store and walking out with a couple hundred dollars’ worth of merchandise.”

“Then arrest me,” Hendy said with a smirk.

“We could,” Jooheon said slowly as though really mulling over the idea and savoring the very thought. “And boy would I love to. I know a prison cell with your name on it and it’s been expecting a resident for a _while_. But...”

Hendy’s smirk widened. “But you want something from me, huh?”

“You, my friend, are a very bright boy.” Jooheon rested his chin on a fist. “So you hear what I’m pitching, yeah? Your prison cell stays empty for a little while longer, and this footage just miraculously disappears...”

“And you want me to snitch on someone,” Hendy guessed, leaning back in his chair with a small snort. “I’d be better off in prison.”

“That could be true,” Jooheon said with a thoughtful nod, looking over at Hyunwoo. “That’d probably be best, right? He gets his time out of the way and goes back to his life of delinquency with all his bones intact.”

“Unless there was an accident at the prison,” Hyunwoo said, shrugging carelessly as though the thought didn’t matter to him. In truth, it _did_ matter, and playing this part was pretty difficult for him, but Jooheon had been very specific as to how they’d play this interview. “And there was a rumor going around that you’d snitched on your friends to get a lighter sentence. They’re in the video too, right?” Hyunwoo asked, looking over at Jooheon, who nodded pleasantly like this whole thing was just a nice cordial chat that happened to be missing a pitcher a lemonade and a plate of stale cookies. Hyunwoo looked back at Hendy. “So, you walk out of prison with _most_ of your bones intact. Still not a bad deal.”

It sounded awfully bad to Hyunwoo. He felt sick.

“Not a bad deal,” Jooheon repeated, taking over with a smile. Hyunwoo got the feeling he didn’t feel as badly as Hyunwoo did about the whole thing. “I mean, unless of course the prison guards don’t get there in time to break it up...so maybe not _most_ of your bones...but still a few...maybe not enough to break into liquor stores in the future, but enough to say, ‘thank you’ when someone’s propping up a straw against your lips because it’s the only way you’ll be able to eat.”

Hendy’s posture still held a bit of casual arrogance, but he’d certainly paled. “You’re threatening me. That’s not allowed.”

“Isn’t it though?” Jooheon looked over at Hyunwoo with a shrug. “I’m no lawyer.”

“Neither am I,” Hyunwoo responded.

Jooheon looked back at Hendy. “Actually, that’s not a bad idea – why don’t you call up a lawyer? Oh, but then he’ll just have you plead out to a worse deal than the one we’re ready to serve you. You’ll still do jail time, you’ll still snitch on your friends, but maybe you get a little time shaved off. Our deal?” Jooheon swept his hand out in front of him as though serving up a prime dish. “No jail time. The video vanishes. Your friends won’t think you’re a snitch. You’ll walk away with all your bones and hopefully not have to eat through a straw for the rest of your foreseeable future. So, Hendy. How does that sound?”

Hendy’s eyes narrowed. “Who do you want me to snitch on?” he asked. Not a clear sign that he’d take their deal, but faint interest at the very least.

“It’s pretty simple,” Jooheon said. “Two kids went missing. Hyungwon and Minhyuk, who live on the block where you hang out sometimes by the motel. Sound familiar?”

Hendy shrugged, but Hyunwoo read the glint of recognition in his eyes. “Maybe, maybe not.”

“Well, they’re missing, and we’d like to find them,” Jooheon said. “That’s the deal. You tell us where they are and you walk.”

Hendy crossed his arms. “What makes you think I know where they are?”

Hyunwoo almost groaned; his body language was incredibly obvious, but unfortunately, ‘the suspect looked suspicious’ didn’t often hold up in court.

“You met up with them a few times recently,” Jooheon said. It was partially based on Kihyun’s intel, partially a guess.

“And?” Hendy asked. “Like you said, I hang around that neighborhood sometimes. Nothing wrong with saying hello.”

“It is when they go missing,” Jooheon said with a razor-sharp smile. “But you already knew that they were missing, didn’t you?”

“I don’t have to incriminate myself,” Hendy said. “Yeah, that’s right, I know my fifth amendment, thank you. And I think I want my lawyer now.”

“That’s fine by me, but the deal I made you is off the table when we leave this room.”

There was nothing warm in Jooheon’s voice, and it really made Hyunwoo realize that Jooheon was just as much invested in this case as he was. For some reason, that made the weight on his shoulders easier to bear.

Hendy was quiet for a long moment. “Let’s just say,” he said before clearing his throat. “Let’s just say that maybe I knew someone who knows what happened to them. That person would be very unhappy with me if I accidentally mentioned their name by some slip of the tongue.”

“I can imagine,” Jooheon said, sounding almost sympathetic. Hyunwoo was honestly starting to admire his acting skills.

“And I’m certain you can imagine that unhappy people can be dangerous people,” Hendy extended. “What’s to protect me if I were to let that information slip?”

“Great question,” Jooheon said. “This friend of yours-”

“I never said we were friends,” Hendy said quickly. “Or even acquaintances.”

Hyunwoo got the feeling like Hendy was on the wrong side of an interrogation a little too often.

“Okay. So let’s say this person you happen to know about who knows the whereabouts of several missing children – let’s say that person is doing something possibly illegal,” Jooheon said in a tone that made it very clear that something illegal was most certainly happening. “We’re going to put that guy in prison, with or without your help. It’s going to happen. Even if you don’t give us a name, we’re going to find out one way or another. So he’s going to end up in prison. And if you don’t give us a name, you’re going to end up in prison too,” Jooheon said, “for the liquor store robbery. And this not-even-an-acquaintance-of-yours character is going to think very long and very hard on who would have given him up, and then he’ll see you during your hour of mandatory exercise in the courtyard, and all the math is going to add up for him.”

Hendy grew paler.

“So whether you tell us or not, he’s going to be unhappy with you, I’m afraid. That’s just the cost of doing business. But where you come in is that you get to choose whether or not you want to be in prison with him. Either you talk and walk, or you clam up and end up as cell buddies with him.” Jooheon dropped his smile. “I can’t promise you protection, but I can promise you that you’re a hell of a lot safer on the outside than the inside.”

“Give me a few minutes to think,” Hendy said.

\--

“Well?” Hyunwoo asked Jooheon once they were outside the interview room. “What do you think?”

“He’ll give us a name,” Jooheon said, sliding his hands into his pockets. “His type always does. They all pretend to have some sort of code – you’ve heard the expression ‘Honor among thieves,’ right? – but in the end, no one wants to be the fall guy. He’ll talk.”

“Then what?”

“Then we find that guy and watch his movements for as long as it takes to lead us to the boys.”

“Then we can bring them home.”

Jooheon smiled. “Then we can bring them home.”

Hyunwoo exhaled unsteadily. He knew he’d never really had a serious assignment as a police officer. This was his first _real_ case, and it wasn’t something he could fail at. The worry was suffocating; he had no idea how Jooheon and the other officers had worked here for years. “Should we go back in?”

“Nah, let’s give him a few more minutes to stew,” Jooheon said easily, giving Hyunwoo a wide smile. “Good opportunity to get coffee. Besides, if we go right back in, he’s going to think we’re too desperate and our leverage will disappear.”

“All right,” Hyunwoo said with a nod. They ambled down the hallway toward the break room, and Hyunwoo took a seat at the small circular table while Jooheon brewed up something for them. Today’s copy of the newspaper was sitting on the table, folded up as though someone had already finished reading their fill, so Hyunwoo tugged it closer and spread it out. He didn’t receive the newspaper at his current address; he was just realizing now that it might be a good way to learn more about the area. Maybe he’d put in for a subscription.

He flipped through the front few pages – some political news on the front, followed by real estate ads and sports headlines on the following pages. He passed up a few advice columns but stopped on a page near the end.

“Whatcha looking at there?” Jooheon asked as he slid in the seat across from Hyunwoo, setting two cups on the table. Steam rose from the brims, and it would be another minute or two before they could drink without fear of scalding their tongues.

Hyunwoo didn’t respond to the question, just spun the newspaper so the text was facing Jooheon. He leaned forward, squinting at the small and slightly smudged text. Blocked between advertisements for a landscaping service and a local tutoring center were several grainy photographs under the bolded headline “MISSING: IF SEEN, CONTACT BELOW.”

“This-” Hyunwoo tapped on the top-left image, “is Minhyuk.” He stared for a second at the photo, transfixed, before he took another breath and tapped on another picture. “And this is Hyungwon.”

“These are the missing boys?” Jooheon rephrased, looking up at Hyunwoo before looking back down at the pictures. “These other kids must be missing too. Shit. Why did we never get a call about them?”

They sat in silence for a few moments before Jooheon sighed and sipped at his coffee, cursing when he burned his tongue. Hyunwoo ignored the coffee and flipped the newspaper back so it was right side up from his view. Then he slowly and neatly ripped out the page with the kids on it and folded it twice before tucking it into his pocket. He might need to show the photos to someone later.

“Ready?” Jooheon asked after he’d finished.

Hyunwoo looked to the coffee sitting in front of him. He felt bad for not drinking it since Jooheon had made it just for him, but he didn’t like coffee altogether that much in the first place. Still, he took a sip because he didn’t want to waste the effort. He cringed at the bitter taste and swallowed the dark liquid before nodding and standing up, newspaper crinkling softly in his pocket. “Ready.”

\--

“So,” Jooheon asked, once again sitting across from Hendy. “What’s your decision?” Jooheon’s posture was slightly slouched and gave off a carefree demeanor as though he didn’t care what Hendy decided. Hyunwoo found it a lot more difficult to play at confidence.

“I’ll give you the name,” Hendy said, and Hyunwoo exhaled quietly in relief. “But then the liquor store thing is gone, yeah? And you can’t tell anyone I told you.”

“Write it down,” Jooheon said, sliding a pad of paper across the table and uncapping a pen. He pushed the pen toward Hendy and waited.

“The liquor store surveillance?” Hendy asked again.

Jooheon sighed and rolled his eyes. “It’ll magically disappear like I told you. Now give us the name.”

“Fine,” Hendy muttered, grabbing the pen and scribbling something on the pad of paper. He pushed it back toward Jooheon, and the pages fluttered with the sudden motion.

Jooheon spun the pad around with one smooth move and stared at the name for a long moment. “You’re sure?” he asked after a second.

Hendy smirked at Jooheon’s response. “That’s the guy you should be putting in prison. Best of luck, fellas.”

Jooheon looked up at Hendy and glared at him, his casual demeanor gone in an instant, and even Hyunwoo got chills from the rage in his stare. “If I find out that you’re the one who brought these kids to him – if I hear even one person mention it – then you’re going to be seeing me again a lot sooner than you thought, and you’re not going to walk that time, you hear me?”

“Like I said,” Hendy said, getting up from his chair. “Good luck.” He pointed to the door. “Since I was never arrested, I should be free to leave, yeah?”

“Get out of here,” Jooheon said, and then Hendy slipped out the door and headed back out of the station to presumably create more trouble.

“What’s wrong?” Hyunwoo asked, taking in Jooheon’s rigid body language. “Who is he?”

Jooheon sighed harshly before moving his hand off the page so Hyunwoo could see.

“Alfonso?”

“They call him Big Al,” Jooheon said, slumping back in his chair. “Which is ironic, since he’s neither tall nor Italian. He’s a stocky Caucasian male, five seven, a hundred eighty-five pounds. Brown hair, brown eyes. Nondescript to a T.”

“Why do you know him?” Hyunwoo asked, feeling that pull in his gut once more that told him that Big Al wasn’t a guy he’d like to meet.

Jooheon was quiet for a long moment before he looked over at Hyunwoo. “Listen. I think you should drop this case.”

“What?” Hyunwoo was shocked but more than that, betrayed. How could Jooheon not care about the lives of two young kids?

“Not- I’m not saying that _we’re_ going to drop the case. I’m going to continue investigating. But I think you should drop it.”

“Why?” Hyunwoo asked after a moment, not entirely reassured by his answer.

Jooheon blew out a breath and tapped the now capped pen against the legal pad. “Look. I peeked at your file a few months ago ‘cause I’d heard that we were getting a transfer and I was curious, okay?”

“You looked at my file?”

“You gave out more warnings than tickets and you seemed to spend most of your time playing the friendly neighborhood officer rather than arresting people.”

Hyunwoo clenched his jaw. “There wasn’t a lot of crime back in my old precinct, what was I supposed to do about that? Mirandize citizens at random?”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Jooheon clarified after a moment, holding his hands up defensively. “I’m not saying there’s anything bad or wrong with working in a slow town. But...this case is going to get really dark, Hyunwoo. I mean it.”

“And you don’t think I can handle that,” Hyunwoo surmised.

Jooheon’s features shifted to belie his uncertainty. “I think we’re going to find out things over the course of this investigation that would rob any seasoned cop of sleep for months,” Jooheon said evenly.

“Jooheon, I know these kids. This is personal to me.” Hyunwoo took a deep breath, picturing their smiling faces in his mind. “I can’t let this go. I’m not going to drop the case.”

Jooheon waited a long moment before nodding. “All right, I’ll respect your decision. I just wanted to make sure you know exactly what you’re getting into with this.”

“Tell me about Big Al.”

Jooheon tapped at the paper with the pen again. “Big Al has been under suspicion for a long time.” Jooheon blew out another breath as though he were reluctant to go on. “He’s connected to various operations, but as of recently, we’ve come to believe that he’s involved in sex trafficking.”

Not for the first time since taking on the case, Hyunwoo felt horrified. “How do you know? Why haven’t you guys arrested him yet?”

“Because we don’t have the evidence to do it,” Jooheon said, dropping the pen to grab his opposite forearm instead. “I’d like nothing better than to arrest him. But if we go to trial without enough evidence, he walks, and then we won’t be able to try him for the same crimes again due to double jeopardy. So we’ve been trying to amass enough evidence to take him down for good, but he’s careful. Not to mention how much money he’s spent on retainers for some powerful defense attorneys.”

“So how do the police know about his...business?” Hyunwoo was hesitant to even call it that and make it sound legitimate, but he wasn’t sure of a better word to use.

“A former employee,” Jooheon said, tapping at the table now with his finger. “But they wouldn’t tell us exactly how Big Al advertises his operation. You’ve heard of Pizzagate, Wayfairgate?”

Hyunwoo blinked. “You’re talking about the conspiracy theories saying that a pizzeria and a cabinetmaker, respectively, were hubs for child sex trafficking rings?”

“Right,” Jooheon said. “And as of now, that information has been discredited. But the idea isn’t entirely false. There are trafficking rings out there that operate under some ulterior front. The problem is, we don’t know what Big Al’s front is.”

Jooheon fell into a frustrated silence, and Hyunwoo’s mind turned over the new information. He pulled the newspaper and stared down at the kids, trying to prompt his mind into some grand realization. Jooheon looked over at the newspaper and immediately frowned before looking away.

“Hey,” Hyunwoo said abruptly, staring down at the newspaper.

“What?”

“Nothing, there’s just...something bothering me about this.”

Jooheon pulled the newspaper closer so it sat between the two of them. His eyes scanned the headline and pictures once again. “You’re wondering about the other kids? Why no one reported them?”

“That’s just it,” Hyunwoo said, looking up at Jooheon. “Nobody reported Hyungwon and Minhyuk.”

They were quiet.

“You’re sure?” Jooheon asked.

“Well, I don’t know about Hyungwon,” Hyunwoo admitted after a moment. “His parents wouldn’t talk to me. But I talked to Minhyuk’s parents – mostly his mom – and they refused to acknowledge that he was missing. If they wouldn’t talk to me, then I doubt they reported his absence. I can only assume the same for Hyungwon’s parents. Or parent,” he corrected, realizing he’d only ever heard of a mom. He wasn’t sure if Hyungwon had a father in the picture.

“Well, it’s true that they avoid police interference,” Jooheon mused. “But if they didn’t report the kids missing – and _we_ didn’t put this page up – then who published the column?”

“I don’t know,” Hyunwoo said. “But what you said earlier got me thinking. About fronts, I mean. Wouldn’t the cleverest front be the most truthful one?”

Jooheon stared at Hyunwoo, encouraging him to keep talking.

“I just mean, well, look. We saw this page and assumed it was published by someone reputable, and I’m sure those related to the victims would assume the same. We think the parents put up the notice, and the parents think we put up the notice. And the information in and of itself is factually accurate – the kids _are_ missing. So no one would bat an eye at it or raise questions because it’s true. And if the kids on this page are really being trafficked, then no one should be contacting the tip number because these kids are being locked up somewhere. No one will have seen them but the traffickers and clients themselves.”

“So anyone who contacts the number – or at least the firm majority – are people who recognize this as what it is: an advertisement.”

Hyunwoo nodded. “That’s...that’s what I was thinking, at least. And I’m probably wrong. But I don’t know of anyone who reported these boys missing, so the only people who would know are us and the people who took them.”

Jooheon’s face turned ashen so quickly that Hyunwoo gripped his arm, afraid that Jooheon was about to faint. “Hey, are you okay?”

“Not really,” Jooheon mumbled. He took a few breaths, and while no color returned to his face, he seemed to stabilize a bit. “Hyunwoo, if that’s true...” He blew out a breath. “The newspaper has been running a page like this for a long time. Not every week, but periodically. I always thought it was weird how they buried it in the back, but I...I never...I didn’t think to-” He gripped his hands together in front of him, squeezing hard enough for the bones in his knuckles to protrude. “All those kids...”

“We don’t know,” Hyunwoo said quickly. “We can’t be sure, not yet.”

Jooheon just nodded weakly. “I’ll...call the newspaper. Try and find out who paid for the column. But Hyunwoo, if you’re right-”

Hyunwoo stared down at the newspaper.

“Let’s hope I’m not.”


	5. Chapter 5

> _“The places where water comes together with other water. Those places stand out in my mind like holy places.”_
> 
> _― Raymond Carver, Where Water Comes Together with Other Water: Poems_

The newspaper couldn’t release the information. Or, they told Jooheon what they knew, which amounted to basically nothing.

“So what’s our next step?” Hyunwoo asked with a frown. It had been three hours since they’d talked to Hendy and questioned the ad. He was frustrated by the fact that three whole hours had passed without making any real progress.

Jooheon looked equally frustrated. He’d slammed the phone several times in the past few hours while talking to person after person who was just as unhelpful as all the rest. “Let’s assume, for a second, that it’s real,” he proposed. “What would our best course of action be to locate the kids?”

“Call the number,” Hyunwoo said, and Jooheon nodded. He turned to look down at the newspaper ad, which was spread across his desk.

“Can’t use this phone, though,” he said, giving his desk phone a glare. “I don’t want to risk them running the number.”

“We can use my cell phone?” Hyunwoo suggested, and Jooheon started to nod before shaking his head.

“We can use it, but not here. They might be able to triangulate our position. If they ping your phone, we don’t want the location to show as the police station.” He got up abruptly, swinging his jacket off the back of the chair and slipping his arms in. “C’mon, let’s drive around for a bit and park in a sketchy neighborhood.”

“Thought you’d never ask.”

\--

Hyunwoo looked to Jooheon, who nodded, and Hyunwoo dialed the number.

“Hello, this is the missing child information line,” recited a male of indeterminate age.

“Hi,” Hyunwoo said instinctively because it was rude not to greet someone. Jooheon pantomimed slapping his forehead, and Hyunwoo threw a finger up to his lips before clearing his throat. “I, uh, saw your ad in the paper.”

“Uh huh,” the man said, not sounding particularly interested. Certainly not as interested as someone would be if they were actually looking for missing children. “And?”

“And, I...” Hyunwoo blanked for a moment. Of course they weren’t going to ask him directly if he wanted to purchase an illicit service. “I heard about your service from a friend,” he continued, shrugging at Jooheon since it was the best excuse he could come up with.

“What friend?” the voice asked, and Hyunwoo looked at Jooheon with wide eyes.

Jooheon waved his hands hurriedly as though to get Hyunwoo to hang up, but Hyunwoo just cleared his throat once more. “Hendy.”

Jooheon looked up at the roof of the car as though considering whether that had been a good call, and after a moment, he shrugged.

“All right,” the voice replied after a moment, and Hyunwoo had to pull the phone away from his mouth so he could exhale. “Which one did you want?”

The words were phrased so curtly, so carelessly. Hyunwoo pictured in his mind the small pictures of the boys in the newspaper. Fake front or not, he’d kept the clipping with him because it was all he had to document the boys’ existence.

But the question was more painful than just that. He hadn’t thought about it too much before, but he could really only name one boy. It would look suspicious if he asked for both, wouldn’t it? He wasn’t sure, but he couldn’t afford to get caught, not until he’d found the boys.

Which meant he had to choose.

“The one in the top left of the ad,” he said after a moment, referencing Minhyuk. No names had been printed, so that was all the information he could really give without raising suspicion. His heart sank after his mouth released the words though because he felt like he was abandoning Hyungwon, but he’d made the hard decision. Minhyuk was older; he might be able to give Hyunwoo more information that could help them suspend the entire operation.

He’d gone into this chasing two boys, but they weren’t the only kids being trafficked.

“Fine, and when?” the man asked impatiently.

“When is he available?” Hyunwoo asked after a moment. He’d never ordered a kid before, he had no idea what the hell to ask or what the procedure was. He’d never even thought the phrase “ordered a kid” would pass through his mind.

“Our regular openings are 12PM, 3PM, 6PM, 9PM, and midnight,” he said. “The 9 and 12 are open.”

Hyunwoo glanced at the clock. It was a little after four, which meant someone had already booked out the 6:00 opening. Which meant someone was going to rape Minhyuk in two hours.

And there was nothing he could do about it.

“Can I book them both?” Hyunwoo asked abruptly, screwing his eyes shut as though that would make his request less suspicious.

There was a surprised silence before the man on the other end of the line said, “That’s fine, but you have to be gone by 2AM. And there’s an additional fee if you’re booking consecutive slots.”

“How much is a slot?”

“Hundred bucks.”

Hyunwoo almost coughed.

One hundred dollars...

He made that in around five hours of work.

And that was all that was needed to buy the darkest sin.

“And what’s the additional fee?” he forced himself to ask. He felt dizzy. He felt sick. He wanted to throw up. He wanted to drop the phone under his foot and smash it into a thousand bits. But if he didn’t finish the call, someone else would book Minhyuk for 9 and 12, and they would hurt him. Just like someone was going to do in two hours.

“Fifty. So, your total will be 250. Cash only.”

“Fine,” Hyunwoo said. “Where do I show up?”

“I’ll send you the details later,” he said before the line went dead.

Hyunwoo stared at the phone for a moment before letting it fall from his grasp. It hit the center console, bounced once, and slipped into the gap beside his seat. “Fuck,” he mumbled. His eyes burned. He hadn’t cried in...he didn’t know how long. He’d never been a crier. People around him had cried, and he’d provided a warm shoulder to lean on, but he’d never been the one to cry. And yet somehow he couldn’t stop the tears.

“You did good,” Jooheon assured him, but Hyunwoo shook his head. The tears were starting to blur his vision, and he rubbed at his eyes with the bases of his palms.

“ _Good_ would have been calling before someone already bought the earlier slots,” Hyunwoo said, hating how wobbly his voice sounded. But this wasn’t sitting okay with him. Maybe it was because he wasn’t a seasoned cop, but he didn’t care what that made him. The violation of children would never be okay with him. “ _Good_ would have been knowing they’d gone missing earlier. _Good_ would have been preventing them from being taken in the first place.”

“Hyunwoo-”

Hyunwoo batted away Jooheon’s hand, turning to glare at him even as he knew his anger wasn’t justified. Not at Jooheon at least. “Those other officers- they didn’t notice anything. These kids have been missing for _weeks_ , Jooheon. Being sold five times a _day_. That’s-” His brain ventured to calculate the horrible statistic. “Two weeks, that’s fourteen days, five times a day, that’s...that’s seventy times.” He choked on the last word. “They may have been sold as much as _seventy times each,_ Jooheon. That’s- that’s-”

Hyunwoo scrambled with the car door handle, fumbling with the lock and at last managing to throw the door open. “I’m going to be sick,” he muttered before stepping out of the car and bending over, placing his hands on his knees and taking big breaths.

He distantly heard a car door shutting and footsteps as Jooheon hurried around to his side. “Are you okay?” he asked in a low voice.

“No I’m not fucking okay, none of this is fucking okay,” Hyunwoo said.

“I know,” Jooheon whispered. “It’s not.”

“Someone is going to violate Minhyuk in two hours,” Hyunwoo said. It was easier to say ‘violate’ than ‘rape,’ but he meant the same thing.

“I know,” Jooheon said, and although Hyunwoo wasn’t looking over at him, he thought he heard unsteadiness in Jooheon’s tone that mirrored his own.

“And Hyungwon-” The tears came without abandon then. He was the one who had made the call. He’d made the decision he’d thought would best help them save the kids. But all that meant was that he’d chosen to let Hyungwon be violated three times tonight in addition to any earlier instances.

“Maybe no one booked his slots,” Jooheon suggested quietly, but it was phrased in a hopeful tone rather than a realistic one.

“Why can’t you call up and-”

“I can’t,” Jooheon said, clearly having already considered the thought earlier. “They’ll know all the regular cops. You’re new, so you’re the only one of us that can pull this off.”

“But-”

“Did you ever see _The Enigma_?” Jooheon asked suddenly, and Hyunwoo looked up, confused, his face still wet.

“What?”

“ _The Enigma_. It’s a movie about Alan Turing and the Enigma machine.”

“Now is not the time to talk about fucking movie recommendations-”

“There’s a point in the movie where Turing cracks the code,” Jooheon interrupted. His eyes were on Hyunwoo’s, and they bored into him intently. So, not a movie recommendation. “And he decodes a message that says the enemy will launch their next attack on a certain location. So of course Turing wants to warn those troops so they can be safe.” Jooheon paused now that he had Hyunwoo’s attention. “But the problem was that they learned of a bigger attack happening at a later date, and if they prevented the first, smaller attack, then the Germans would know that the code had been broken, and they would change the code and plan.”

“So?” Hyunwoo asked, even though he thought he already understood Jooheon’s point.

“So, he had to make the tough decision to let the smaller group of men die in order to save the larger group,” Jooheon said. “Of course he was upset. But pragmatically, it was the better decision.”

“So you’re telling me that I’m supposed to be okay with sacrificing Hyungwon tonight and Minhyuk at 6:00 in order to save all the kids?” Hyunwoo asked, biting down angrily.

“I’m not saying that it’s supposed to somehow be okay. But it’s the only choice we can make,” Jooheon said, his eyes old and sad. “I’m sorry, Hyunwoo. But if we can do this right, then we’re not just saving Hyungwon and Minhyuk, we’re saving all those kids, and all the kids who would have come after them.” At least until Big Al set up his operation elsewhere, but neither of them wanted to point that out.

Hyunwoo saw Jooheon’s point, but he was angry nonetheless. The other kids were just pictures in a newspaper to him. Which sounded horrible, but...Hyungwon and Minhyuk were living, breathing entities. He knew in his mind that each of those other kids had people who loved and missed them, but he had only started down this rabbit hole because of two missing boys.

And now he wasn’t allowed to protect the one thing he’d sought to.

Jooheon disappeared for a minute before reappearing with Hyunwoo’s cell phone in his palm. “Here,” he said quietly, and there was pain in his voice that told Hyunwoo that Jooheon was no less invested in the boys’ well-being than he was. “You’re going to need this for when he sends the details.”

Hyunwoo took the phone without offering any words, and Jooheon went around and got in the car on the driver’s side.

Hyunwoo waited another minute before slipping into the passenger seat, and they drove back toward the station in silence.

\--

Six o’clock passed with Hyunwoo throwing up in the men’s bathroom of a fast food restaurant. Jooheon wouldn’t let him return to the station in case his phone was pinged, so he’d been hanging out in a nearby McDonald’s trying to look inconspicuous for the past hour and change.

He called Jooheon every fifteen minutes or so for any updates, which meant he got to hear Jooheon swearing every few seconds, accompanied by the angry clicking of keyboard keys. Had he been in the physical station, he would have seen Jooheon typing, deleting and retyping the same words after they were misspelled because his hands were shaking so badly.

Hyunwoo figured that most everyone else had to have gone home since the workday had already ended, but Hyunwoo and Jooheon’s work wasn’t over yet and wouldn’t be for some time.

“Who else is in on this operation?” Hyunwoo asked after the keyboard had silenced.

“A few cops I trust,” Jooheon said after a moment.

“You think there’s a mole?”

“I’m not saying that,” Jooheon said, but he paused. “I’m just saying that I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s at least one person planted in the station by some unknown third party for information. But I pulled a few guys from homicide and narcotics.”

“And they’ll be there tonight?”

He felt rather than saw Jooheon’s nod. Even if he’d been at his desk in the station, he probably would only be talking to Jooheon through the cubicle wall rather than facing him directly. He was still a little angry at Jooheon for allowing him to make the hard call, but he was angry at himself too because he knew that Jooheon was right, even if he didn’t want to admit it. “We’ll be covering you. If you see an opportunity for us to move in – and that’s after you’ve verified the location and that there’s no immediate danger to the kids – then we’ll bust the operation. But we can’t risk moving in too soon if the kids could be injured or if they’re being held in separate unknown locations.”

“I know, I know,” Hyunwoo said even though the information was useful. He just needed somebody to be angry at, someone within his reach, and he knew that it was unfair of him to take it out on Jooheon but he did so anyway.

“Hyunwoo...”

“What?” His voice came out sharper than intended, and he sensed Jooheon tense.

“I just...think you’re in too deep with this case,” Jooheon said in a low voice. “Maybe you should-”

“Should what?” Hyunwoo asked. “Let someone else take over? After they failed to notice two kids who had been missing for weeks?”

“I’m not saying that, I know you need to be involved with the case, but maybe you should talk to-”

“I’m fine,” Hyunwoo said. They both knew it was a lie, of course; Hyunwoo had never before had an angry temperament, but Jooheon was right. He’d gotten too close to the case, and he was starting to absorb its darkness. He felt shaky and unsure of himself. If they didn’t resolve everything perfectly, he didn’t know what he’d do.

“Okay,” Jooheon agreed readily, kinder than Hyunwoo deserved given his attitude today. “I just wanted to let you know that we have a really great psychologist on staff – his name is Hoseok, and you could talk to him about how you feel and about the case.” A small pause. “And Hyunwoo, there’s no shame in that. I’ve gotten too close to cases before too, and talking with Hoseok really helped. He made me realize that at the end of the day, I’m only human too. And I know...I know there’s this misconception that the more you hurt about something, the more of a difference you’re making, but that’s just not true,” Jooheon said. “You can help with a case but not let it consume you.”

Hyunwoo was quiet for longer this time before he said, “I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine, buddy,” Jooheon said back quietly. “And no one’s asking you to be. But I want you to be okay, and I think talking to Hoseok would help.”

“I’ll think about it,” Hyunwoo finally muttered, realizing that if he didn’t agree with Jooheon at some point, he’d never hear the end of it. He didn’t want to talk to a psychologist because it seemed ridiculous in his mind, the idea that he could somehow consider himself to be hurting when he knew there were children being raped.

As though Jooheon picked up on his silence, he added, “Pain isn’t a competition, Hyunwoo. Pain is relative, not a maximum function. The person who’s hurting the most doesn’t get to be the only one hurting. Just remember that.”

There was a soft hiss from Jooheon’s chair as though he’d stood up, and then the call ended.

\--

“Ready?”

Hyunwoo did a quick mental inventory. He felt like throwing up, and he was shaking; he wasn’t sure if it was fear, anxiety, or adrenaline. Maybe a mix of the three.

“Ready.”

Jooheon gave a tight smile, having showed up at the McDonald’s after finishing up some desk work. They hadn’t talked in the past hour and a half, but when Hyunwoo’s phone had dinged with a text message containing only an address from an unknown sender, they’d kicked things into gear.

“Now, once you pull up, they’ll probably-”

“Move me to a secondary location, I know,” Hyunwoo interrupted, his foot tapping at a quick pace. Maybe the shakiness _was_ due to adrenaline; he felt all of a sudden like he couldn’t possibly wait a moment longer.

“We’ll keep up,” Jooheon promised. “You won’t see us if we’re doing our job well, but trust that we’ll be backing you up. Once you’re in position, call me to let me know if our guys are good to move in.”

“And if the cell reception is blocked? Or if they take my phone?”

“If you don’t get word to us, then we’ll hold our position until we hear from you.” Jooheon paused, skimming his thumb over his knuckles. “I know you’re anxious to get these kids out as soon as possible, but I’m not willing to compromise their lives to do it. I need to know first and foremost that we’re clear to move in.”

“Got it,” Hyunwoo said, grabbing his keys off his desk.

“Hyunwoo?”

“What?” Hyunwoo asked, looking up.

Jooheon’s faced rotated through a few complex emotions before he settled on a grimace, the closest he could get to a smile. “Good luck.”

Hyunwoo just nodded, not really knowing what to say and still not in a mood to talk. He needed to _go_ , he needed to get there, to find the boys. Every second he lingered in the station was an additional second the boys were being held captive. “You too,” he finally said before heading out to the parking lot. As instructed, he pulled out from the lot and drove around for ten minutes in random patterns to make sure he wasn’t being tailed, then he set his GPS for the location on his phone.

Twenty minutes later, he pulled into a parking lot on the seedy side of the second district, and as per the text, he rolled down the window and waited.

A few minutes later, a black truck pulled in next to him, and the passenger window of the car rolled down. “Step out of your car and put your hands behind your head,” a man instructed, and Hyunwoo swallowed but turned off the engine and did as asked.

He stood in the gap between the two cars and put his hands behind his head, getting the odd feeling that he was about to be arrested. But a second later, he heard a car door slam, and then a pair of hands began patting down his leg.

“Relax,” the man snapped.

Hyunwoo had instinctively startled, but he exhaled and held still while he was patted down.

“Turn.”

He did so and found himself face-to-face with a wiry but tall man with a shaven head and sunglasses. Not Big Al, clearly, but maybe someone high up in his organization.

“Clear,” he called out after a moment to his partner. He stepped back as another man emerged from the vehicle.

“Cash payments only,” he said, holding out his hand palm-up.

Not the man he’d heard over the phone, either. Most likely they had one to two people running the phone, and one or two teams like this to collect their payment.

Hyunwoo pulled out two hundreds and a fifty from his pocket and set them in the outstretched hand. Jooheon had given him a wallet for the operation preloaded with a fake driver’s license and fake credit card, but he didn’t want to expose his false identity to any further scrutiny than necessary. Besides, they’d insisted on cash and the bills were marked, which would hopefully lead to the rest of the operation’s finances.

The man grunted and nodded to the taller guy who had patted Hyunwoo down. “Let’s go.”

“Get in the car,” the taller man said, opening the back door to their car, and Hyunwoo swallowed before getting in. He’d known that he’d be moved to a second destination, but it still made him nervous. With his car, he at least had some autonomy, some control. Now that illusion was gone.

The front of the car was cut off from the back in a similar manner to taxi cabs with a small window that was currently closed. The back windows surrounding Hyunwoo were blacked out so he couldn’t see anything outside and very little of the interior of the car.

He’d never felt more helpless. All he could do was pray that Jooheon hadn’t lied about having his back.

It was another fifteen or twenty minutes before the car came to a stop, and a minute after stopping that his car door was opened.

“Out.”

Hyunwoo stepped out, feeling a little nauseous from the movement of the car without the vision of movement to go along with it. He stepped out to find himself in an unfamiliar area of the Tampa suburbs. A quick glance led him to believe that they’d pulled into the alley behind a one-story motel of some sort, but he didn’t recognize the location.

“That’s Gu,” the shorter of the two men said, pointing to a man huddled against the wall of the back alley and squatting on a stack of newspapers. By all accounts, he appeared to be homeless, but Hyunwoo had a feeling that was just as much of an act as their newspaper ad had been. “He’ll get you set up. We’ll pick you up when your time runs out.”

Hyunwoo nodded, and they hopped back in the truck before taking off. Then it was just Hyunwoo and Gu in the alley.

He approached cautiously, not quite sure what to expect, but when the older man grinned at him with a mouthful of misaligned teeth, he grimaced.

“You’ve come to fuck a kid, ye?” Gu asked cheerily, and Hyunwoo’s stomach dropped. A small nod was all he could manage, and Gu cackled to himself. Maybe he really _was_ homeless, but he was in on the take.

“Which one?” Gu asked. Hyunwoo almost answered “Minhyuk” instinctively, which would have blown his cover or at the very least drawn suspicion, but Gu adjusted his sitting position to reveal the ad from the paper.

Wordlessly, Hyunwoo set a finger on Minhyuk’s picture, afraid of speaking and blowing the entire operation, and Gu just grinned. “A good choice ye’ve made.” He fished around in his paper change cup before coming up with a small key ring. One key was small and silver, and the second key was larger than the first, made of brass, and had a number seven drawn on it in black marker.

“This is ‘im,” Gu said, holding out the keys, and Hyunwoo took them, flinching when his finger touched the man’s. Gu laughed again, and Hyunwoo quickly withdrew his hand.

“The small key?” Hyunwoo asked, eyes flicking between the key ring and the old man.

“He’ll be cuffed to the bed,” Gu said, amusement in his eyes. It must have been clear that Hyunwoo had never done this before. “Feel free to get freaky or creative however you want, but he’s got to be cuffed back to the bed before you leave or you pay extra.”

Hyunwoo just nodded, telling himself that he could throw up again after this was done. If he got sick now, then he’d ruin everything. “Right.”

“Have fun,” Gu said, and Hyunwoo just turned away, unable to look at him anymore. It didn’t matter to him how much they were all respectively involved; anyone who aided in the process of trafficking people – especially children – disgusted him.

He set across the alley, slipped the brass key into the corresponding door, and entered the motel room.


	6. Chapter 6

> _“When you live in the dark for so long, you begin to love it. And it loves you back, and isn’t that the point? You think, the face turns to the shadows, and just as well. It accepts, it heals, it allows. But it also devours.”_
> 
> _― Raymond Carver_

He shut the door behind himself, locking it. It was pointless since they probably had spare keys, but it made him feel safer to have a barrier between him and the horrible people outside.

Then he proceeded farther into the room.

He passed a bathroom on the right before coming upon the bedroom. As promised, Minhyuk was curled up on the bed, back against the headboard and knees tucked into his chest, left wrist hanging low and handcuffed to the bedpost.

He looked up as Hyunwoo entered, and his face lit up with the barest glimpse of hope before his expression shattered, his eyes guttering out.

“Why?” he asked after a moment, his voice hollow. “Why are you here? Why does it have to be you?”

Hyunwoo quickly realized that Minhyuk had come to the conclusion that he was here to abuse him like everyone else. Only not quite like everyone else because Minhyuk _knew_ Hyunwoo, and being violated by a stranger was altogether more bearable than facing the same treatment from someone of familiarity. “No, no, Minhyuk, I’m not-”

“Don’t say my name,” Minhyuk snapped, closing his eyes. “Don’t say my name like you know me and then tear me apart.”

“Minhyuk, I’m not here to- I’m not here to hurt you. I promise,” Hyunwoo said. He put his hands up in a defensive position and knelt on the floor to demonstrate his intentions, and Minhyuk opened his eyes and stared at him doubtfully.

“I’ve been trying to find you,” Hyunwoo said, trying to keep his words slow and even and comprehensible whilst they were rushing in his mind like a wildfire eating up the coast. “You and Hyungwon. I’ve been searching for you, and when I heard you might be...might be here, I had to come and find out.”

Minhyuk just stared at him. Finally, “You’re here...to find me?” he asked in a small, skeptical voice.

Hyunwoo nodded. “Kihyun has been very worried about you,” he said, and Minhyuk’s face pinched up, eyes growing wet even as he looked down, rubbing his face against his shirt to hide them. “Your family, too,” he added as an afterthought. He hoped it was true. Minhyuk at least deserved to hear it, regardless of the veracity of the statement.

“Kihyun’s gonna be pissed at me,” Minhyuk said, laughing and crying at the same time. “He told me not to go off with Hendy, but I...I was stupid I didn’t listen, and-”

“It’s okay,” Hyunwoo said after a moment before fumbling with the keys in his hand. “H-Here,” he said, getting Minhyuk’s attention before tossing the keys onto the bed. Minhyuk stared at them for a moment before grasping them with his right hand and picking out the small silver key. He inserted it into the lock and twisted this way and that for a moment before the cuff clicked free, and he pulled his wrist into his chest, rubbing at the red skin.

“So you’re going to take me home?” he asked after a second, and Hyunwoo swallowed.

“I...”

“Oh.” Quiet disappointment. Lowered eyes, upturned lips. Hands pulling in tighter around his knees.

“If it’s safe,” Hyunwoo quickly added. “I have other officers ready to take all of you home, but they need to know that you’re all safe first.” He paused, biting at his lip. “Is there any reason that wouldn’t be true? Any reason to think that you’re in danger of physical harm?”

Minhyuk shrugged, looking down at the bedsheet. Even though the bed was at least a queen, he was hunched up in the top corner of it, and despite freeing his wrist, he’d only seemed to collapse in on himself further. “They have a guy.”

“A guy? Gu, outside? The old guy?”

Minhyuk shook his head before shrugging. “They have another guy. He’s got a gun, and he hangs around to make sure nothing’s going wrong. Like if one of the people coming in does something they’re not supposed to, or if one of the kids try getting out.”

“Did you try getting out?” Hyunwoo asked softly.

Minhyuk bobbed his head forward. His bangs were too long now, and they fell in front of his eyes, hiding them from Hyunwoo. “Once, the second day. Someone was...here...and once I got the chance, I ran for the door and got outside.” He gave a small chuckle. “Buck naked. I should have been ashamed, but I wasn’t, that was the last thing I was thinking about.” His grin faded. “I wanted...to find Hyungwon, but...I didn’t know where they were keeping him. So I told myself I’d come back and get him out, I just...I had to get out first.” He wiped at one of his eyes, shaking his head. “But then the guy came, a-and he beat me so bad, I just laid in the bathtub for a full day, couldn’t even move after I washed off the blood.” Minhyuk tried for another smile, but his eyes fell short of it. “They beat you if you’re not...you know, cooperative...so, so I...”

He sniffled and rubbed at his nose, looking away, shame painting his face with burning cheeks. “I just didn’t want to get hit anymore.”

“That’s okay,” Hyunwoo said in a soft voice. “You protected yourself. That was all you could do. You have nothing to be ashamed of. Whatever you’ve done – whatever’s been done to you, that’s not your fault, Minhyuk.”

Minhyuk’s soft chuckle told Hyunwoo that he disagreed, but he didn’t argue about it. Instead, he turned to look at Hyunwoo. “If you can only take one of us tonight, can you get Hyungwon out? This whole thing is my fault, and he...It was like Kihyun said, he told me to stay away from Hendy because he was bad news, but-” He wiped at his nose again before scrunching it up and sniffling again. “-we were just so hungry, me and Hyungwon, and Hendy said...” A pause. “He said he knew a way we could get money, and I- I asked him if it involved drugs because we didn’t want any part of that, and he said it didn’t, that it would be fine, and...”

He broke off, setting his face down in his palms. “And I said okay, and Hyungwon said he’d go if I went, because...because he trusts me, and I...and so, it’s my fault that he’s here too. I was dumb so I deserve what I got but Hyungwon shouldn’t’ve gotten caught up in this.”

“Nobody deserves to be treated this way,” Hyunwoo corrected firmly. “It doesn’t matter what you did or said, nothing would have made this okay. Do you understand that, Minhyuk?”

He shrugged but went back to his point. “So, can you take Hyungwon with you?” he asked, looking up.

“Do you know where he’s at?” Hyunwoo asked, and Minhyuk nodded.

“He’s in room twelve, I think.”

“When did you see him last?”

Minhyuk shrugged, looking up at the ceiling. “It’s hard to keep track of days, but...maybe five – six? – days ago...They gathered all of us up in a room so...” He swallowed, his face paling. “So they – there were a couple of them – could pick which ones they wanted, and...” There was a slight pause before he shut his eyes and cried out. “And they picked him and not me and I felt, I felt so guilty, and he looked...so scared, and he asked me to help him, but I didn’t know- I didn’t know how, I tried to make them pick me instead but they pushed me out of the way.”

He rocked his body back and forth, hitting the headboard with each beat, but Hyunwoo knew that to touch him would be to frighten him. “They dragged me back to my room but the others kids and Hyungwon had to stay, had to stay with all of those horrible awful people and-” Minhyuk squeezed his eyes shut even harder, a pained whine coming out of his throat. The rocking slowed to a stop after a minute as he put the thoughts out of his mind, and when Minhyuk swallowed and looked over at Hyunwoo, he seemed slightly calmer but still noticeably distressed. “They called him twelve and they called me seven, so I think...I think that’s his room. Twelve. Because I’m seven.”

“It’s not your fault,” Hyunwoo tried to say yet again, but Minhyuk just looked away and refused to speak.

“I’m going to call my partner and let him know what you told me,” Hyunwoo said after a long moment, pulling out his phone and dialing Jooheon’s number. He let out a tense sigh of relief as he heard the signal connecting.

“Hey,” Jooheon said after having picked up immediately. “Are you okay? How’s it going?”

“I’m here with Minhyuk,” Hyunwoo said, and he saw Minhyuk tense on the bed at the mention. “Do you have our location?”

“Yeah. We followed you after the vehicle switch. You’re right on the outskirts of Tampa now. Is it safe for us to move in?”

“I don’t know,” Hyunwoo said. “Minhyuk said there’s at least one guy out here who’s got a gun. I didn’t see him earlier, but I have reason to believe he’s nearby.”

“Homeless guy in the alley?”

“Not him. A different guy. But Gu – that’s the guy in the alley – he might have a gun too, I don’t know. I didn’t see one but he could have it stashed under the newspapers. He’s also got keys to all the rooms.”

“Hyunwoo, we can’t move in until we get eyes on this second guy,” Jooheon said after a second in the same tone someone would use to tell Hyunwoo that his pet goldfish had died.

“I know,” Hyunwoo said, exhaling heavily. “Just, call me back when you see him.”

“Will do.”

They hung up, and Minhyuk looked up with hopeless eyes as though he’d heard every word. “They’re not coming to get us?”

Hyunwoo’s heart felt as though someone had just smashed it with a meat hammer, trying to flatten it out to make it easier to cut into small pieces. “They’re coming, just not yet,” Hyunwoo said. “It’s not safe until we know where the guy with the gun is. If they rush in without having eyes on him-”

“He could shoot your cop friends, I get it,” Minhyuk mumbled, and Hyunwoo shook his head.

“No, Minhyuk- well, yes, that could happen, but they’re prepared for that. They have vests on to protect them. But you kids don’t. That’s what they’re worried about, that this guy might hurt you kids, and we don’t want that to happen.”

“Oh.” Minhyuk was quiet for a while, but that was okay. Hyunwoo didn’t want to rush anything, and they had several hours, after all. “It’s okay if you can’t take us home,” Minhyuk said after a few minutes, and Hyunwoo looked up with a frown. “I didn’t even think anyone would come after me and Hyungwon.”

“I’m not going to leave without you guys,” Hyunwoo said, but the words held empty in the air without anything to substantiate them.

Minhyuk just shrugged, still staring down at the bedsheets as he drew patterns on them with his finger. “You might not have a choice.”

Hyunwoo’s phone rang, and he flipped it open immediately. “Are you guys ready?” he asked.

A sigh from Jooheon. “We can’t, Hyunwoo. Not yet. We just spotted the guy you’re talking about – we’re pretty sure that’s the guy – but he went into one of the kids’ rooms. We can’t move in when he’s in there with a gun.”

Hyungwon would forever feel guilty that his immediate question was “Which room?”

Jooheon paused as though he found the question sort of strange. “Ten, why?”

Hyunwoo exhaled. He felt horribly guilty for having the thought, but all he could feel was relief that it hadn’t been room twelve. All it meant was that it was some other kid being abused, and his relief in that fact was horrible and tangible and disgusting, but it was all he could process for the time being. “Fine. Tell me when he leaves.”

He shut the phone to find Minhyuk staring at him with a small, resigned smile. “That’s okay,” Minhyuk said. “We didn’t expect to be rescued anyways. It’s nice enough that you’re here and not somebody else. Can’t we just enjoy that?”

Hyunwoo wanted to cry because he should have been the one consoling the kid. “Minhyuk, I promise you, we’re going to-”

“Shh,” Minhyuk said, putting a finger up to his lips. “No more promises. I don’t want to expect anything other than this, okay? Let’s just talk for a while.”

And so they talked since that was what Minhyuk wanted. He told a lot of stories about how bossy Kihyun was, but it was clear in every word that Minhyuk respected and admired the older boy.

Hyunwoo was mostly quiet, just listened and nodded and asked questions. He didn’t think sharing the life of an adult would be anything but boring, but he liked hearing Minhyuk ramble on about his own small adventures. It gave Hyunwoo hope that maybe Minhyuk would be able to add new happy memories soon. At one point, Minhyuk took a break to go pee, but then he was back two minutes later with endless more stories to spill.

All too soon there was a knock at the door.

Minhyuk stiffened mid-story, and Hyunwoo looked between the door and Minhyuk.

“That’s the five-minute warning,” Minhyuk whispered before slipping his wrist back into the handcuff and shutting it with a click. “You have to go.”

“No, I...” Hyunwoo’s breath caught. He looked around the room as though searching for a clue or a magical method of escape, but it was still just a dreary motel room. No magic.

“Go,” Minhyuk urged, tossing the keys back to Hyunwoo. They fell at his feet. “And help me-” Minhyuk pulled at the bedsheets, yanking them out of alignment and trying to rumple them. “Come on, we have to make it look like, you know. Help me out, I can’t reach that far. I should’ve done this before I put the handcuff on. Stupid.”

Hyunwoo swallowed but nodded, hurrying to the end of the bed and pulling at the sheets so they appeared disorderly. Then he called Jooheon.

“What’s the holdup?” Hyunwoo snapped.

“We’ve got eyes on the guy. He’s been lingering in the alley for a bit, popping into rooms occasionally to escort a client out, and he’s outside your room right now. I told you, we can’t move until he’s in a position where he won’t be able to hurt the kids.”

“Fuck,” Hyunwoo muttered before looking over at Minhyuk apologetically. “Sorry,” he added before focusing back on the conversation. “Jooheon, you guys have to-”

“We’ll stay here the whole night,” Jooheon promised. “As soon as he’s distanced from the kids, we’ll move in. I promise, Hyunwoo. But you have to go now or they’ll get suspicious.”

“But...” Hyunwoo looked over at Minhyuk with wet eyes. “Jooheon, they’re right here, can’t we just...What if I-”

“Hyunwoo, if any of the kids get hurt tonight, I know you’ll hold that against yourself for your entire life,” Jooheon said gently. “You did your job. You got the location. So please, let us do our job. Trust us to see this through.”

“Fine,” Hyunwoo agreed in a rough voice, turning away because he couldn’t bear to meet Minhyuk’s eyes. “Just- please, you have to save these kids.”

“We will,” Jooheon said firmly, not a shred of doubt or uncertainty in his voice. “And Hyunwoo, I’ll call you just as soon as we do.”

“All right.” He took a deep breath. “All right, thanks.”

He hung up and turned to look at Minhyuk. “They’re saying it’s still not safe to get you guys, but they’re going to camp out the entire night and wait for a good opportunity. They’re going to bring you home, Minhyuk.” The words _I promise_ hesitated before his lips, but he remembered Minhyuk’s earlier request, and he let them dissolve on his tongue.

“Okay,” Minhyuk said.

“Do you trust me?” Hyunwoo asked after a moment.

Minhyuk hesitated before he nodded, and his eyes were clear. “I trust you.”

Hyunwoo smiled even though his stomach felt weak. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten that day. He’d known inherently that he would have thrown it all up if he’d had the chance. “All right,” he said to the boy. “Trust me when I say that my friends are going to bring you home.”

Minhyuk just nodded before pointing to the door. “You have to go.”

Hyunwoo swallowed painfully but nodded, scooping the keys off the ground before nodding at Minhyuk and exiting the room.

The man who Minhyuk had described was leaning against the wall outside the door. He went into the room for a minute, presumably to check and make sure that Minhyuk was properly cuffed to the bedpost and that there weren’t any debilitating injuries, before he came back outside. He took the keys from Hyunwoo, locked the door, and tested the knob before nodding and tossing the keys to Gu just as the black truck from earlier pulled up.

“Any issues?” the shorter man from earlier asked the grunt with the gun.

“No injuries,” he reported. “Cuffed to the bed.”

“Good,” the shorter man said before giving Hyunwoo an uneven grin. “No additional fees, then. Get in the back.”

Hyunwoo nodded and got in the car as before, and once more, he experienced a strange nausea as they drove him back to the lot from before. His car door opened sometime letter, and he stepped out to find himself just a parking spot away from his car.

“Call the same number as before when you want to schedule your next appointment,” the shorter man grunted before the car pulled away with a screech.

Hyunwoo patted his pockets with shaky hands for his own car keys only to panic when he found them missing. He checked all his pockets again before trying the driver’s side door and finding it unlocked. With a heavy exhale, he slid into the seat to find that he’d left the keys in the ignition the entire time due to his nerves.

He laughed then, a sad and nervous laugh that quickly bubbled into tears, and he sat in the lot for half an hour or more, forehead resting against the steering wheel with Minhyuk’s eyes dancing in the dark spots of his vision.

Eventually, he turned the engine on and drove home, going ten miles under the speed limit the whole way. Earlier, he’d felt the need for quickness, the need for acceleration, the need to act in urgency, but now that his part of it was over, he felt slow and heavy and reluctant. He didn’t feel closure because he hadn’t been the one to personally walk the kids out of their rooms, and he wouldn’t get to be that person. He just had to trust that _someone_ would be that person, that someone would do that for those boys and girls, that someone would bring them home. Even if it wasn’t him. As long as it was somebody.

He pulled into the parking lot of his apartment building, but even after he’d turned the engine off, he continued sitting in his car and staring ahead at the bushes that served as a barrier between the lot and the street. He couldn’t quite put it into words, but he had the sinking feeling that to go inside would be to give up, that he had to be here, ready to go at any moment.

And so he never got out of the car.

\--

He must have dozed off at least lightly because the ringing of his phone woke him up at some later time.

“Hmm,” Hyunwoo responded, rubbing his bleary eyes as he struggled to lift the phone to his ear. His eyes gradually migrated from the wheel to the bushes to the clock to see that it was just past 4:30 in the morning.

“We got the kids,” Jooheon said, a note of relief but also fatigue in his voice. “We’re heading back to the station now.”

Hyunwoo sat up straight in his seat and once more patted down his pockets before checking the ignition to find the keys waiting for him. He had to stop doing that. “I’ll meet you there,” he said, and then he hung up and turned the key in the ignition.

\--

He made it to the station in ten minutes after driving faster than normal, which he then regretted because he was left waiting in the parking lot. The anxiety within him seem to build every minute until finally, _finally_ he saw Jooheon’s car pull in, followed by several others.

Hyunwoo stepped out of his car, remembering to grab his keys this time, and he’d just managed to shut and lock the car by the time Jooheon killed his engine.

“You got them?” Hyunwoo asked, still doubtful even though Jooheon had called him personally as promised. But until he saw the kids, he wouldn’t be able to believe with complete certainty that they were okay.

“See for yourself,” Jooheon said, yawning as he opened the back door and waved at the figures inside to come out.

Minhyuk stepped out first, looking up at Hyunwoo and giving him a weak smile. Then Hyungwon slid out from next to him, and he stared down at the ground until Minhyuk nudged his shoulder.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, looking up for a brief moment to meet Hyunwoo’s eyes before his eyes slipped down, down, down back to the pavement. “Thank you,” he added, his voice small and emotionless, almost like he was talking from a distance.

“No need to thank us,” Jooheon said. “I’m just sorry that it took us this long to bring you guys home.”

Minhyuk wiped at his eyes and sniffled, but Hyungwon didn’t react, just kept staring at the fractured blacktop. The same process was repeating with the other cars that had pulled in; kids were stepping out of the backseats and looking around like frightened deer. Nearly two dozen kids in total.

“C’mon, let’s get you all inside where it’s warm. Maybe we can scrounge up some snacks and hot cocoa,” Jooheon suggested, and Minhyuk smiled, pulling Hyungwon along after him as Jooheon led them into the building.

Hyunwoo stayed behind for a moment and leaned against his car, exhaling as the parking lot emptied out to leave only himself. He waited for all the anticipation and anxiety to exit, but it didn’t. It continued to weigh him down until he felt like he might never go inside if he didn’t physically push himself off from against the car.

He did after a minute, and he dragged his heavy self into the station.

\--

“Hyunwoo, this is Hoseok,” Jooheon introduced, clapping one hand on Hoseok’s shoulder and the other on Hyunwoo’s.

“Nice to meet you,” Hoseok said with a warm smile despite the dark bags under his eyes that told Hyunwoo he’d been pulled out of bed for this.

“Thanks but I’m fine,” Hyunwoo said, shaking his outstretched hand nonetheless.

“Well, I’d still like to talk to you later if you’re willing, but my first priority is to talk with the kids,” Hoseok said, and Hyunwoo immediately felt stupid for assuming Jooheon had dragged the psychologist here purely on Hyunwoo’s account.

“I’m sorry, I-”

“It’s perfectly okay,” Hoseok said with another smile. “Kids who suffer trauma like these react to it in all different ways, and it’s important that we identify which children will be able to recover more easily and which children will need additional resources to heal.”

“How could anyone recover from something like this?” Hyunwoo asked, not yet capable of filtering his thoughts.

Hoseok’s eyes conveyed both his sadness and empathy; it was like looking into a well of emotions. It made Hyunwoo somehow uncomfortable because he often hid his emotions from his face, and Hoseok seemed to be the exact opposite. “Kids are a lot stronger than you’d think,” he said softly. “But I agree that what happened was terrible.” He paused to look down at his watch. “I need to get started, but you’re welcome to watch. I just ask that you do so from the observation room instead of entering the room with me – the more adults in the room, the more anxious the kids will be.”

Jooheon and Hyunwoo both nodded, and Hoseok gave a small wave before heading off to the interrogation rooms where they were purportedly keeping the kids for now.

“Everything went okay?” Hyunwoo asked after a second. “No one got hurt?”

“No one got hurt,” Jooheon confirmed with a nod. “Listen, Hyunwoo...”

Hyunwoo tensed, preparing himself for bad news, but Jooheon just set a hand on his shoulder. He looked older than he had just yesterday, somehow.

“Thanks for...for trusting us. I know it had to be hard to walk out of the room and leave the kid behind, but you let us do our job, and everyone ended up coming home safely as a result.”

Hyunwoo nodded before looking down the hallway Hoseok had taken. “Can we...can we go watch?”

Jooheon nodded, a small smile slipping onto his lips as though he’d been waiting for Hyunwoo to ask. “Sure. But first...I need coffee.”


	7. Chapter 7

> _“And the terrible thing, the terrible thing is, but the good thing too, the saving grace, is that if something happened to one of us--excuse me for saying this--but if something happened to one of us tomorrow, I think the other one, the other person, would grieve for a while, you know, but then the surviving party would go out and love again, have someone else soon enough. All this, all of this love we're talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory.”_
> 
> _― Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love_

“We got all the kids some blankets, coloring books, and snacks to make them comfortable,” Jooheon explained as he led Hyunwoo toward the interrogation rooms after they’d both restocked on caffeine. “Well, that was mostly Hoseok, but still.” He opened the door to one of the rooms, popped his head in, and closed the door without entering. He repeated the process several times before he apparently saw Hoseok on the other side of the glass, and he shouldered open the door, leaning on it so Hyunwoo could slip past. Then they both took a seat in front of the observation mirror.

Hoseok was currently talking with Minhyuk, who had ignored the coloring book but had accepted the blanket and snacks.

“You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to,” Hoseok was saying. “I’m not here to interrogate you, Minhyuk. I’m really just here to listen.”

“So I don’t have to say anything?” Minhyuk asked, pulling the blanket a little together around himself. “Not if I don’t want to?”

“Not if you don’t want to,” Hoseok confirmed with a warm smile. Hyunwoo frowned; it seemed like Hoseok got along so easily with kids, and Hyunwoo wished he were that naturally sociable.

Minhyuk looked down for a moment before looking back over at Hoseok. “Can me and Hyungwon be in the same room?”

Hoseok nodded. “We can make that happen, but I’m going to listen to Hyungwon first, okay? He might have things he wants to say but doesn’t want you to hear, and I want to make sure he has an opportunity to be listened to if he wants it.”

“All right.” Minhyuk nodded, restless but satisfied for the moment. “What do you want to know?”

Hoseok shook his head. “It’s not about what _I_ want to know, Minhyuk. It’s about what you _want_ me to know. You get to choose what – if anything – you want to tell me. And Minhyuk, you don’t owe me any information. You don’t have to tell me or the officers anything, if you don’t want to.”

“But what I tell you could help the case, right?” Minhyuk asked, looking up at Hoseok with eyes older than his years.

Hoseok shrugged. “I’m just the psychologist. Yes, it’s possible that you may know things that could help with the case, but my priority is your health and safety. I work with the police, but that doesn’t always mean we want the same thing. Although-” Hoseok paused to look up at the window with a knowing smile even though he couldn’t possibly see Hyunwoo or Jooheon. “I think it’s safe to say that these officers have the same priorities as me right now.”

“You want me to pick out pictures or something?” Minhyuk asked uncertainly, eyebrows dipping.

Hoseok read his anxiety at the thought and shook his head. “I don’t think we need to do that right away.”

“Then what exactly do you want me to say?” Minhyuk asked, clearly frustrated as he picked as loose threads on the blanket.

“How are you feeling?” Hoseok asked, switching tactics a little bit. “Not just physically in the moment, but mentally. How do you feel as a result of what happened?”

“Guilty,” Minhyuk said quietly.

“Why’s that?”

“Because it was my fault that it even happened, and it was my fault that Hyungwon went too. Everything that happened to him is my fault.”

“No, Minhyuk,” Hoseok corrected softly but firmly. “The only people responsible are the ones that hurt both of you. You’re not at fault for what happened.”

“That’s what you and Officer Hyunwoo say, but I know the truth,” Minhyuk said, sniffling.

Eventually, the sniffling turned to crying, and Jooheon and Hyunwoo stepped out of the observation room to wait in the hallway while Hoseok comforted Minhyuk.

\--

They moved into the next observation room just in time to watch Hoseok enter.

“Hi, Hyungwon,” he greeted softly, and the boy at the table looked up for a brief moment before going back to his coloring page. He paused briefly to scratch at a red rash on his arm – most likely the resurgence of his eczema – but then he resumed coloring.

“What are you working on?” Hoseok asked as he sat down in the seat next to Hyungwon.

“Picture,” Hyungwon muttered, busy with the red crayon.

“You’re coloring a...a candy? Is that right?” Hoseok asked, leaning forward to peek at the art masterpiece in progress.

Hyungwon mumbled something, and Hoseok asked him to repeat it.

“...passing them around like candies,” he said in an odd tone as though he were repeating something he’d heard rather than using his own words.

“Passing what around like candies?” Hoseok asked, a frown on his face.

“They’d pick out the ones they liked the best, the shiniest ones, and then they would take turns unwrapping them,” Hyungwon said, still working on his coloring rather than looking at Hoseok. “And then they would get a taste, and once they’d gotten enough of the flavor, they’d pass them along to someone else to try. Like candy.”

Hoseok leaned back in his chair, eyes troubled and posture tense. “Who are ‘they’ and ‘them’?” he tried asking, but Hyungwon ignored him and continued to ignore all his following questions.

After five minutes of noncooperation, Hoseok finally admitted defeat and met Hyunwoo and Jooheon out in the hallway. “I’m worried about him,” Hoseok stated directly. “He’s one of the youngest children the team recovered. And sometimes kids can shield their emotions and pain behind stories or drawings - even claiming that the events happened to someone else – but to see a child removed on multiple levels at once is...” Hoseok took a deep breath before meeting their eyes. “Troubling, to say the least.”

“Are any of the other kids reacting like that?” Jooheon asked, lips slanting in a concerned frown.

Hoseok hesitated before tilting his head from side to side. “Yes and no. Are they reacting in the same exact way? No. But do they all show signs of attempting to cope with the trauma of sexual abuse?” He exhaled heavily. “Of course they do. But every victim copes in a different way. One of the other boys that was recovered – he’s maybe two years older than Minhyuk – outright denied the fact that he’d ever been sexually exploited. He said nobody had ever touched him. But we know for a fact, based on the newspaper clippings the team found, that he’s been missing for over a month. And once our medical examiner takes a look at each child, I’m positive that we’ll find physical evidence pointing to sexual abuse for every one of them.”

“So why deny it?” Hyunwoo asked. Part of him wanted to meet the boy and learn his story, but it felt like his heart was too heavy to hold any more pain.

Hoseok grimaced, kneading at his knuckles while he verbalized his thoughts. “It’s a complicated issue. There’s the abuse in and of itself, and some victims try to deny it to create the narrative – at least to themselves – that it never happened. A defensive protection mechanism, basically. But there’s more than just the trauma factor. A certain amount of shame – unjustified shame that of course they shouldn’t carry but do nonetheless – goes along with it. And that factor is exponentially higher in male victims of sexual abuse because society has perpetuated the idea that men, the biologically stronger of the two sexes, should be able to resist exploitation more successfully than women.”

They fell into an awkward silence in which they each contemplated what Hoseok had said.

“But it’s some sort of awful catch 22,” Hoseok said with a sigh. “People expect victims to be female, and so they provide resources for female victims. But society largely avoids or ignores the possibility of male victims, so you don’t see as many resources for them. You can find all sorts of centers and programs for women who are victims of sexual abuse, but those same resources for males are much rarer, which makes coping with the aftermath much more difficult for victims who already feel socially pressured to be ashamed.”

“You mentioned other coping methods?” Jooheon asked after a long moment. “There’s- whatever Hyungwon is doing, and you just mentioned denial. I’m assuming neither are healthy options, right?”

Hosoek started to shrug again but caught himself with a sheepish grin. “I’m sorry to give you more grey answers, but...it’s not exactly black and white. Some studies propose four main categories of coping mechanisms – avoidant, internalized, angry, and active-slash-social coping. And within each of those categories are a number of other mechanisms – minimizing, rationalizing, disassociating, vanishing, lashing out, lying...But to give you an example of what I mean...”

He paused and looked up at the ceiling tiles while he tried to pick a good example. “Take supervigilance.” He was about to go on when he noticed Hyunwoo’s confused look, and he smiled and backtracked to explain. “Supervigilance is...well, it’s like a state of constant alertness. Someone experiencing this is always anticipating a threat or attack, always putting themselves in a position for easy egress.” Catching Hyunwoo’s dipping frown, he quickly clarified, “Exit, I mean. Always searching for an easy exit in case danger arises. Or sometimes supervigilance manifests in an interpersonal way, in which the subject is anticipatory instead towards the moods and actions of others.”

Hyunwoo gave a small nod to show that he understood at least partially, and Hoseok nodded back before continuing on with his earlier point.

“Some victims develop this sort of supervigilance as a defensive mechanism. They’re trying to prevent themselves from being hurt again, by situations or by people, so they remain highly cautious. So, is this coping mechanism ‘good’?” Hoseok paused after throwing up a pair of air quotes, but neither of them answered because he had a degree in psychology and they didn’t. “Well, they’re less likely to be endangered if they’re constantly on alert for it, so in a sense, it’s effective rather than innately good. But moreso than that, someone who is supervigilant and therefore more perceptive of their environment – possibly obsessively so – may find success in a career where it’s helpful to be detail-orientated. So, not all coping mechanisms are inherently bad, is what I’m trying to say. The question is simply whether the function serves well in a specific environment. A supervigilant person may have a more difficult time living in the city, for instance, because there’s so much to observe that the person may be overwhelmed by trying to process it all.”

“Okay, well, what about Hyungwon?” Hyunwoo asked, trying not to sound frustrated.

“It’s hard to say exactly what mechanism he’s using,” Hoseok admitted after a moment. “In terms of the main four categories, he aligns most closely with avoidant behavior. Specifically...” Hoseok tilted his head. “Dissociation, maybe. The idea there is that the subject is able to escape the situation mentally as it’s happening. A safe space in the brain, so to speak. So they cope with traumatic events without necessarily feeling them, which sounds good in theory but can result in this same mechanism being triggered by other things, whereupon they’ll once more disassociate and vanish into that mental safe space. They don’t really process the trauma because they’re essentially blocking it out as it’s happening, which can make a healthy recovery more difficult.”

Hoseok paused as though checking through what other mechanisms might apply. “There’s another theory that’s fairly similar. Some people refer to it as ‘disappearing’ or ‘fading,’ or a number of other terms. It’s another way of referring to when a subject ‘disappears’ into their own headspaces and just...checks out from the world for a while. Some subjects have described being in this space and feeling invisible in a sense, or feeling as though others couldn’t see them once they had ‘disappeared’ or ‘faded.’ It’s another way of avoiding reality.”

Hoseok looked at Hyunwoo specifically, a worried set to his mouth. “That’s what I’m worried about with Hyungwon. One of these sorts of mechanisms may have enabled him to get through those traumatic experiences, but if that behavior continues, then I’m worried what it will mean long-term for him.”

“But you said-” Hyunwoo fumbled to find the right words. He wasn’t a psychologist, and he didn’t have a college degree. So he couldn’t possibly be as eloquent as Hoseok, and that frustrated him a bit. “You said- you said that these kids could still be healthy and successful, even with their coping mechanisms.”

“Some can,” Hoseok half-agreed with a small nod. “But earlier, when I was talking about supervigilance – that’s a mechanism that can be honed into a skill of perception. But disassociation only serves to remove someone from reality, which in turn pushes them farther away from recovering and healing. That isn’t to say that someone who experiences disassociation or ‘disappearing’ can’t be healthy or successful,” he hurried on. “Just that it’s more likely to create issues in the future rather than resolve them.”

“And...and Minhyuk?” Hyunwoo asked after a moment.

Hoseok nodded to himself, mentally running through his notes from earlier. “Minhyuk is...surprisingly well-adjusted. He doesn’t seem to be in denial of what occurred, and while he isn’t particularly forthcoming with his experience, he doesn’t seem to experience psychological avoidance. And I didn’t detect any ‘angry’ or chaotic behaviors. A lot of children end up displaying that sort of behavior as a means of signaling that they need attention and care – I identified one or two children that I believe fit in this category – but Minhyuk is...”

Hoseok shrugged. “I can’t yet claim that he’s doing well because I can’t presume to know that after only a short discussion, and symptoms can always manifest later, but he doesn’t seem to be struggling as much as the other children.” Hoseok crossed his arms and pursed his lips, deep in thought. “My initial conclusion was that he’s more concerned at the moment with acting as a caretaker to Hyungwon, which could result in him neglecting his own psychological needs for the time being. But again, that’s not necessarily bad – a lot of people cope by helping others cope because it validates their own feelings and experiences. Not only that, compassion towards someone else has also been shown to decrease anxiety and depression, so I think this could be a helpful mechanism for Minhyuk.”

Jooheon opened his mouth, seemingly more than ready to continue debating the psychological theory at play, but Hyunwoo interrupted. “Can I move Minhyuk into Hyungwon’s room now?”

Hoseok looked caught off guard for half a moment before he nodded. “Sure, do you want me to-”

“I got it, you guys can keep talking,” Hyunwoo said, already giving a small wave and walking down the hallway. It wasn’t that he wasn’t interested in what Hoseok had to say; he wanted to understand what the kids were thinking, it was just...It was hard to stand around talking indirectly about hypothetical things when he could just go talk to the kids directly and make sure they were okay.

Although that was a stupid thought since of course they weren’t okay, but he felt like if he could just talk to them, then maybe he’d be able to figure out if they were _going_ to be okay.

He went to Minhyuk’s room and knocked politely before pushing the door open and leaning in without ever actually crossing the threshold with his foot. “Minhyuk?”

Minhyuk looked over, and a small smile appeared on his face when he took in the identity of his visitor.

“Do you want to go sit in Hyungwon’s room instead? Hoseok finished talking with him,” Hyunwoo offered, and Minhyuk nodded, standing up while still clutching the blanket to his chest. He paused only to grab a few snacks from the table before following Hyunwoo out into the hallway and two doors down.

Once again, Hyunwoo gave a light knock before holding open the door, letting Minhyuk go ahead of him. Hyungwon didn’t look up until Minhyuk plopped down in the seat next to him and dumped a small sea of strawberry fruit snacks on the shiny steel table.

“I got strawberry,” Minhyuk declared loudly, overcompensating for the silence of the room.

Hyungwon stopped coloring to look over at Minhyuk, and he seemed to exhale spiritually in a sense, sinking back more comfortably in his chair and losing interest in his drawing. “I have blueberry,” he said quietly, pushing his pile of fruit snacks in the middle toward Minhyuk’s so they had a veritable mound.

“Can I have one?” Minhyuk asked, already reaching for a blueberry fruit snack pack as Hyungwon nodded.

“Do you want a strawberry one?” Minhyuk asked, and Hyungwon just shrugged.

They conversed among themselves for a little bit, mostly just Minhyuk talking, as Hyunwoo took in the scaly red patches on Hyungwon’s arms with a small frown. Those upset him just as much as everything else, for some reason, maybe simply because they represented pain that had been completely avoidable.

Hyunwoo wanted to stay, but he thought that maybe they needed a little time alone, just kids, so he closed the door and walked back toward Hoseok and Jooheon.

“...where people can get into trouble, drinking or using drugs as a means of temporarily blocking the memory of trauma.” Hoseok paused, still facing Jooheon because he hadn’t yet seen Hyunwoo come back. “These children are at higher risk for that mechanism of coping in the long run due to their environment. If they return to their homes – assuming most of them reside in the fourth quadrant – then those substances will be easily accessible for them to abuse.”

Jooheon looked over at Hyunwoo with a fake smile that hid the usual concern. “Hoseok here was just telling me about other risk factors for the kids.”

Hoseok took a step back and adjusted so he was facing both of them. “It’s not definite-”

“But highly likely,” Jooheon said with a sigh. “These kids have been exposed to drugs since they were born. And I’m not trying to generalize here, I’m just trying to be realistic. The neighborhoods these kids are from have high drug activity. The chances of them falling into a pattern of drug abuse _before_ were high. Adding in factors of sexual exploitation and childhood trauma...”

He sighed, dropping his head and rubbing at his temple.

“Hey,” Hyunwoo said softly, eyes troubled. “You don’t know that that’s what will happen. Hoseok said earlier that they could grow up to be healthy and successful.”

“But do you really think that’s what’s going to happen?” Jooheon asked, still rubbing at his forehead, and maybe it was the fatigue or the fading of adrenaline, but he sounded close to tears. “Every kid I work with, I always tell myself, _You don’t know what’ll happen._ I always believe in them and try to get them to believe in themselves. And I’m so convincing, I fool myself. And then three years later, I’m busting them for selling, or I’m identifying some OD victim, and I...”

Jooheon’s hand lowered from his forehead to wipe at his eyes. “I just can’t- I don’t want to do that anymore. I don’t know how many more kids I have to watch ruin their lives or die too young. And...” He looked up briefly with watering eyes to look at the door to Hyungwon and Minhyuk’s room. “They’re just so young,” he mumbled, looking down once more and wiping harshly at his eyes to catch any remaining tears. “I don’t want to watch them get older. I don’t want to see what they’ll become.”

Maybe that was why Hyunwoo’s anxiety hadn’t eased after they’d been rescued. Maybe he’d known that they’d fixed the immediate issue only to unearth a lifetime of trauma. Maybe he would never be able to rid himself of this perpetual feel of unease.

“Not every kid is Gunhee,” Hoseok said gently, and Jooheon froze up before glaring at Hoseok. The change was so sudden that Hyunwoo took half a step back. He realized that he’d never seen Jooheon angry, _really_ angry, before, and that this was probably it.

“I wouldn’t have told you about it if I’d known that you’d bring it up every fucking time I’m upset,” Jooheon said. “You’re here for the kids, aren’t you? Then why the hell are you digging around in my head? Go fuck with someone else’s mind for a change.”

Hoseok looked slightly taken aback, but he put his hands up respectfully and spoke in his normal soothing voice. “Jooheon, I’m just trying to-”

“I don’t care,” Jooheon snapped. “What you’re trying to do and what you’re doing are the same thing to me. And I asked you after last time not to bring it up. I _asked you_ ,” Jooheon said, his eyebrows furrowing downward as he relayed the breach of trust. “So how come you gotta remind me every fucking time?”

“Because you haven’t dealt with it emotionally,” Hoseok said, still calm, but there was worry on his face. “And every time you end up in a similar situation, you react in the same way. It’s not healthy for you, and it’s not fair to the victims.”

Jooheon looked like he wanted to argue some more, but after a second, he turned away and started walking back toward the other end of the station where the cubicles and break room were located. Hyunwoo hung around another second, avoiding Hoseok’s pleading gaze, before following after him.

He found Jooheon in front of his desk, arms crossed and head laying across them.

“You all right?” he asked quietly as he settled into his own chair. For some reason, he felt calmer knowing that other people were emotionally struggling as well. He felt less alone, in a way. Like someone else lashing out validated his own difficulty in keeping his temper in check.

“I hate shrinks,” Jooheon muttered after a moment, and Hyunwoo huffed lightly.

“You’re the one who told me I should talk to one,” Hyunwoo reminded Jooheon, and his partner groaned.

“I know, I know. It’s generally a good idea. Just...” Jooheon didn’t sit up, but his eyes met Hyunwoo’s. “Once they figure out what buttons to push, they’re like a five-year-old with a PS4. They never let go of the fucking controller and they just button mash away. And I know he thinks he’s doing it out of some fucked-up benevolence but...”

“Nobody appreciates being mentally dissected,” Hyunwoo agreed. He wasn’t sure which mental buttons Hoseok would try to push with him. He honestly wasn’t sure where he’d drawn his own lines in the sand. But he was discovering things about himself that he’d never known – this anxiety, this frustration – and they worried him. He wasn’t sure he wanted someone else to magnify those unpleasant features.

“Yeah,” Jooheon agreed after a moment. His eyes fell from Hyunwoo’s to instead stare at the cubicle wall. “He was from the fourth quadrant in the Walour Motel, same as Minhyuk and Hyungwon.”

“Gunhee?” Hyunwoo asked, and Jooheon nodded his head slightly.

“He was my best friend, growing up. I lived a few blocks over, and we would hang out from sunup to sundown.” A small crossed Jooheon’s lips as he reminisced. “We got into a lot of stupid shit, but nothing really bad. Didn’t touch drugs, cause we’d seen what they did to everyone around us and we didn’t want that.” The smile flickered. “He was...so surprised when I told him that I was thinking about becoming a cop. He told me the same things everyone was telling me – that cops had it out for people in our neighborhood, that the system was unfair, that I’d never make it anyway. But I asked him how the hell I was supposed to change any of those things from outside the system?”

Jooheon’s eyelids slid down half an inch. “So I joined up and he stayed back. I checked in with him every now and then, but...it just wasn’t like before. It’s hard being a cop and a friend at the same time. The same way it’s hard being friends with Hoseok when he’s trying to pick at your brain all the time. It’s just different.” He sighed, and the smile disappeared. “But I still checked in, and I asked him if he was getting into drugs, and he _promised_ me-” Jooheon’s voice cracked. “-he _promised_ me that he was never going to do any of that shit and that it had nothing to do with me being a cop, that he just didn’t want to. And I thought...I really thought that he meant it, that me and him could make a difference somehow, that if we turned out better than the rest, other people would follow our example.”

Jooheon’s eyelids finally fluttered shut, and his voice along with them.

“What happened?” Hyunwoo asked as softly as he could.

“What do you think happened?” Jooheon asked with a small huff, eyes still closed. “I was the lucky person who got to ID him when he overdosed.”

“I’m sorry,” Hyunwoo replied out of instinct, but the words sort of came forth on their own.

“So am I,” Jooheon said, and somehow, the words sounded like a question. “There was so much he could’ve been, could’ve done. But he only got as far as the needle in his arm would let him go.” A slight pause as Jooheon circled back to their earlier conversation. “Hoseok says...I feel guilty. That I couldn’t save him.” Another pause, only this one sounded like Jooheon was waiting for Hyunwoo to fill it with agreement. He stayed quiet. “But I’m honestly just so disappointed that he didn’t save himself.”

The words hit home with Hyunwoo, even if he couldn’t immediately identify why they resonated with him quite so much. Another apology was hesitating on his lips, but somehow, he sensed that Jooheon didn’t want more apologies on his friend’s behalf. “And you’re worried that these kids...that they’ll turn out the same way?”

Jooheon’s eyes fluttered open to fix Hyunwoo with a sad gaze. “I just don’t want you to be shocked, later.”


	8. Chapter 8

> _“And certain things around us will change, become easier or harder, one thing or the other, but nothing will ever really be any different. I believe that. We have made our decisions, our lives have been set in motion, and they will go on and on until they stop. But if that is true, then what? I mean, what if you believe that, but you keep it covered up, until one day something happens that should change something, but then you see nothing is going to change after all. What then? Meanwhile, the people around you continue to talk and act as if you were the same person as yesterday, or last night, or five minutes before, but you are really undergoing a crisis, your heart feels damaged…”_
> 
> _― Raymond Carver, Short Cuts: Selected Stories_

The next few days passed altogether too quickly. Perhaps because Hyunwoo was near-delirious the entire time, sustained solely by coffee and brief naps stolen at his desk. He didn’t sleep more than an hour straight for at least forty-eight hours, and he didn’t think Jooheon had fared any better. But that was the job, sometimes slow, sometimes all-consuming.

This was all-consuming for him. More than just temporally. There was something about this case. And yeah, maybe it was simply because it was his first case, his first _real_ case, that he got the odd feeling like he’d never really be able to move on from it. Like they could shut the file but never really close it. It was haunting, in a way. But in the end, he knew he’d done all he could, and they’d recovered all the kids safely, which was a small blessing in and of itself.

He tried to tune out Jooheon’s ill words and forewarnings, but he only felt himself growing more anxious over time. The coffee and lack of sleep didn’t help. He nearly punched the captain in the face after getting tapped on the shoulder; his nerves were damn near shot.

“We’re turning the evidence over to the Feds for them to pick up the case, and you already got the kids back, so your work here is done. Get some rest, both of you,” the captain said, eyeing Hyunwoo before looking over at Jooheon and raising an eyebrow as though expecting Jooheon to enforce his command.

“Yessir,” Jooheon responded with a lagging salute and a wink.

The captain just rolled his eyes before moving onward.

“Sleep sounds nice,” Hyunwoo mumbled, and his yawn turned into a groan when Jooheon stuck out a hand, a triumphant grin lining his lips.

“Pay up,” Jooheon said with a smirk. According to the rules they’d put in place ever since returning to the station with the kids, every time one of them yawned, they had to put a dollar in the pot. What they were going to do with the money...they had no idea yet.

Still, Hyunwoo picked out an especially wrinkled one dollar bill from his wallet and pressed it into Jooheon’s palm. “Keep the change,” he muttered, ignoring Jooheon’s laughter as he stashed the dollar with the rest.

“You know we’re bringing the kids back tomorrow, right?” Jooheon asked as he pawed through his drawers, trying to locate something. His head was down as he searched through files and manila folders, so he missed the shock that flitted across Hyunwoo’s face.

“Back?” he echoed dumbly, and Jooheon looked up with a questioning gaze.

“Yeah, back. To their families.” Jooheon went back to searching for whatever it was.

“Right,” Hyunwoo agreed immediately, ashamed that he hadn’t been able to fill in the blanks for himself. Ashamed that he’d forgotten for even a second that of course the kids had families. What had he thought, that they’d just...keep the kids in the station indefinitely? Police-station-turned-orphanage?

“But Hoseok’s got them for today. You and me, let’s each head home and get some sleep,” Jooheon said, shoving the drawer shut after coming up empty. He stood up abruptly and grabbed his keys off his desk before turning to look over at Hyunwoo, apprehension lining his brow. “Are you good to drive? I can give you a lift if you want.”

“I’m good,” Hyunwoo said, getting to his feet as well. He liked Jooheon a lot, but he feared that the more time he spent with him, the more he’d take on Jooheon’s dismal perspective for the kids’ futures. Hyunwoo wanted to hang onto his little bit of hope, even if it was stupid, even if it was naïve. He’d play the fool if it meant there was a chance that the kids would end up all right. “I’ll see you tomorrow?” he said, sort of phrasing it as a question, and Jooheon nodded.

Tomorrow, they would return the kids.

\--

Although most if not all of the kids were from the fourth quadrant, they were distributed across the area, so officers split into teams of two to go and reunite families. Jooheon and Hyunwoo paired up as usual and were granted temporary custody of Minhyuk and Hyungwon.

The drive to the Walour Motel was quiet. Even Minhyuk, who tended to ramble on in his own bubbly way about the most inane of things, kept quiet and watched the town pass by outside his window. Hyungwon hadn’t said more than two words since Hyunwoo had greeted him this morning. It made Hyunwoo want to wrap both kids in bubble wrap and never let them go, but he knew it wasn’t really his choice to make.

Too soon, the car rolled to a stop, and Jooheon switched the gear into park before looking back at the kiddos. “Are you guys ready?”

Minhyuk nodded eagerly, an anxious smile worming its way onto his lips, while Hyungwon just gave a half shrug. Minhyuk seemed to read Hyungwon’s apprehension, and he lightly elbowed him. “I bet Kihyun will cry,” he prophesized, and sure enough, a small smile spread on Hyungwon’s face, but it was gone altogether too quickly.

Hyunwoo looked on with a smile as Minhyuk clambered out of the backseat, eager all of a sudden to witness their friend’s tears, and Hyungwon was tugged after him by a firm hand around his wrist.

Hyunwoo got out of the car and came around to the side adjacent to the motel as Minhyuk regained some of his chatterbox energy and began gesturing to the parking lot, rambling on about some game they used to play and would surely play again soon. Hyunwoo was hit with the sudden urge to ruffle their hair, but he stopped himself. He wasn’t their dad. In fact, he wasn’t their _anything_. He was just a police officer. This should be a happy occasion for him, to be able to return the kids to their families.

So why wasn’t he happy?

“C’mon you two,” Jooheon said, taking one of Minhyuk’s hands to lead them onward. His eyes darted up to Hyunwoo’s as though to check if he were okay, and Hyunwoo just gave a small nod, exhaling before following after the trio.

When they got to the lobby, Minhyuk broke free from Jooheon and ran to his mom. Jooheon had called ahead earlier that morning to let the families know, and it looked like they’d been waiting for a while.

“Baby,” Minhyuk’s mom cried out, scooping up Minhyuk and holding him close even though he was too big to pick up anymore.

“Sorry,” Minhyuk said, breaking down immediately, and his eyes shone wetly in the dim lighting. “I’m sorry, Mom, it’s my fault and I-”

“Shush,” she whispered, pressing her hands more firmly against his back. “I was so worried, but...you’re home now. It’s all going to be okay.”

Minhyuk’s father, who Hyunwoo remembered meeting last time, stood slightly behind his wife, arms crossed and posture held in a stiff fashion. Even though his jaw was clenched, Hyunwoo could see the softness in his eyes that told him that even if he didn’t express it, he had been worried too.

The reunion on the other side of the room was a different story.

Hyungwon stood in front of his mother, head bowed forward a bit.

“Hyungwon,” she said, squeezing his shoulders with fingers that looked to be painfully bony. He winced. “Hyungwon, I missed you, you know that?”

Hyungwon mumbled something indiscernible to Hyunwoo, and her grip on him seemed to strengthen.

“These last few days have been hard, so hard,” she said, and Hyunwoo felt something clench in his stomach.

“Days?” Hyunwoo muttered under his breath, staring at Hyungwon’s mom. “It’s been weeks, he’s been missing for _weeks_ and-”

“I know,” Jooheon said quietly, setting a hand on Hyunwoo’s shoulder to prevent him from correcting the woman.

“You know,” Hyunwoo agreed, looking over at Jooheon and trying to suppress the ire rising within him. He hated feeling this angry all the time, but the anger never seemed to leave him anymore. “You know, so how can we just leave him here? She’s been high this whole time, she didn’t even know her kid was missing and we’re just supposed to drop him off and go back to work?”

“It’s not fair,” Jooheon agreed, squeezing Hyunwoo’s shoulder both in validation and in warning. “But it’s not our place to do something about that.”

“It should be. It could be.”

“You want to rip a child away from his mother?” Jooheon asked, an eyebrow raised, and Hyunwoo hesitated before sighing and looking away, unable to meet his eyes.

“I don’t know,” he muttered, shooting a glance at her from across the room. She was hugging Hyunwon now, but that was it – she was hugging him, and he didn’t appear to be hugging back. Hyunwoo couldn’t see his face, but even so, he read the pain in his figure. “I just- I’m worried that if we leave them here, they’ll get hurt again.”

“I know,” Jooheon said, his voice quiet and worn from years on the job. Hyunwoo wondered how many of these situations Jooheon had overseen, how many times he’d seen something upsetting that he hadn’t had the power to change. “But they have as much of a chance to be hurt here as they do anywhere. The foster care system out here...it’s not great, Hyunwoo. In fact, it’s pretty bad. At least here, they have somewhat of a community, friends.”

“But not safety.”

Jooheon was quiet for a long time before he brought his gaze back to the boys, watching them with those sharp eyes of his, eyes that missed nothing but revealed very little. “Safety isn’t something they ever had.”

\--

The boys were back out in the parking lot when Hyunwoo went on his patrol the next day. He could tell from all the way down the street because he could hear the sound of an aluminum can being kicked about across the blacktop.

He stopped by the fence to see Minhyuk punting the can and Kinhyun ducking to avoid being hit in the face. Hyungwon was sitting on the curb that ran along the circumference of the lot, just watching them.

Hyunwoo rattled the fence lightly to draw their attention, and Minhyuk looked up with a grin while Kihyun looked over his shoulder to check out their new visitor.

“Hey,” Kihyun said, tilting his head up in a nod and turning to face Hyunwoo. He trotted over a few steps, hanging back about three meters from the fence as he stuck his hands in his pockets. His lips twisted like he was trying to find the words to say, but Hyunwoo understood it well enough and just smiled.

“How are they doing?” he asked instead, keeping his voice low enough so the others wouldn’t hear him.

Kihyun looked back over his shoulder, looking first at Minhyuk who was grinning at them and bouncing lightly on his toes, then at Hyungwon, who was staring down at the cracks in the blacktop. “They’re...” He turned back to look at Hyunwoo. “They’re here, which is more than I could’ve said yesterday.” He looked down before scuffing at the blacktop with the sole of his shoe. “Thanks to you.”

Hyunwoo just nodded, not wanting to strangle gratitude out of the boy. “They might look fine, but their minds are still recovering,” he said, keeping his voice quiet not just from the others but so Kihyun would understand how touchy the subject was. “They need time,” he said before looking between Hyungwon and Minhyuk. “Time and people who care about them.”

“I know,” Kihyun muttered, kicking at the ground again. “I’m not going to screw up again.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Hyunwoo insisted, but Kihyun scowled, kicking at a rock this time and sending it careening into a nearby portion of the fence.

“Maybe it wasn’t directly my fault, but it was indirectly something I could have prevented,” he corrected before looking up at Hyunwoo with a frown on his face. “They won’t tell me what happened,” he said, his eyes searching Hyunwoo’s with a dark wildness about them. “I mean, I can guess the outlines of it, but...Minhyuk just waves it off, and Hyungwon...he won’t...he’s just gotten quiet. Well, quieter than normal. And I just feel like...” He grit his teeth against each other. “I want to protect them, somehow, but I don’t know how to do that when I don’t even know what I’m protecting them _from_.”

Hyunwoo was quiet because he understood Kihyun’s anger, his weaponized form of helplessness, but he kept quiet because he was selfish. Selfish because he’d seen and heard things that he didn’t want a young fourteen- or fifteen-year-old boy to have to learn. He hadn’t been able to protect Minhyuk or Hyungwon’s innocence, but was it so horribly selfish of him to want to protect Kihyun’s?

He crouched down on the other side of the fence from Kihyun so they were about eye level with each other. “Their biggest enemies aren’t the people who have already hurt them,” he said quietly before tapping against his head with his right index finger. “It’s their fear of the people who might come to hurt them in the future, and it’s that fear that makes themselves their own worst enemies. So Kihyun...” Was it too much to put on Kihyun’s shoulders? He was just a kid after all, not so much different than them. “I’m sorry to ask this of you,” he said after a moment, his heart heavy, but Kihyun was the only one he could ask, “but could you please watch over them? Even when their minds get confused, even when they try to make decisions that will hurt themselves, can you watch over them?”

Kihyun nodded, hands clenching into fists within his pockets. “Yeah, I can do that.”

“I’m sorry to have to ask you,” Hyunwoo said, exhaling as disappointment weighed down upon his shoulders. He would have liked to trust the other officers, but these kids were too important for him to trust with others. Especially others who had failed in the past.

“It’s fine, it’s my job to protect them cause I’m older,” Kihyun said, standing up a little straighter, and Hyunwoo just took in his posturing with weary eyes.

“Kihyun, I need you to know...if something happens to one of them, if you can’t protect them...that’s not your fault,” Hyunwoo said, already feeling bad enough for laying this extra burden on Kihyun’s shoulders. He knew that even if Kihyun did his best, even if Kihyun and Hyunwoo and Jooheon _all_ did their best, it might simply not be enough. But one boy shouldn’t face all that responsibility, not when two grown men couldn’t do it either.

“Then at what point does it become my fault?” Kihyun asked back, frown solidifying. “I’m not blameless for whatever happens.”

“But you’re just a kid,” Hyunwoo stressed, trying to make Kihyun understand, but Kihyun just took half a step back.

“Being a kid doesn’t stop you from being hurt or from hurting others,” Kihyun argued back before looking over his shoulder at Minhyuk, who was clearly waiting for him to resume their game.

“Just because they were hurt doesn’t mean you have to be,” Hyunwoo said softly, watching as Kihyun tensed because he’d verbally identified that helplessness Kihyun was feeling as guilt, as a sense of needing to make things even. But pain wasn’t something that could be balanced on a mere scale. Pain was balanced over lifetimes, or not at all.

“Thanks for stopping by,” Kihyun said shortly, turning back to the boys but looking over at Hyunwoo as he took a step away from the fence. His eyes were pensive, and Hyunwoo hoped he was considering what Hyunwoo had told him. “See you, Officer,” he said, giving Hyunwoo a small smirk and a mock salute before jogging over to Minhyuk and giving the can a big kick. It ricocheted off the curb next to Hyungwon, but he didn’t even flinch.

Hyunwoo smiled at the boys before looking up to notice Kihyun’s mom out on the balcony, staring down at him, a cigarette dangling between her fingers. He hesitated before holding his hand up in a small wave, waiting for her to yell at him for talking to Kihyun (or to yell at Kihyun for talking to him), but she just exhaled from her cigarette in a small puff of smoke before turning and going back inside.

Hyunwoo swallowed, trying to tamp down the small flicker of hope inside himself.

Progress.

It was small, but...

Progress.

\--

That, like everything else, was ripped away from him in time.

It was about a year or two after the incident with Hyungwon and Minhyuk.

Kihyun had held true to his promise with Hyunwoo, however heavy and unfair the promise had been. He had watched over them, keeping Minhyuk’s mind busy and always keeping Hyungwon within arm’s length. He allowed Minhyuk to ramble at length about all sorts of stupid things, laughing in an obligatory nature at his jokes, and all the while, he’d keep an arm around Hyungwon’s shoulders or a hand brushing against his elbow. Kihyun seemed to understand the situation without Hoseok’s wordy explanations: Minhyuk needed to be distracted, and Hyungwon needed to be kept present.

And that worked, until it didn’t.

\--

Hyunwoo sat in the back of the courthouse and watched as they led some creep away in handcuffs. He watched, his blood cold, as the figure slipped out the doors on his way to a shortened sentence.

“Two years,” Hyunwoo muttered, flinching as the doors clanged shut. “He should’ve gotten fifteen, but he’s getting off with two.”

“He’s going to testify in a homicide case,” Jooheon said, supposedly in defense of the results, but even he sounded tired.

“He shot Kihyun,” Hyunwoo argued even though he knew that Jooheon wasn’t a fan of the outcome either. To be fair, no outcome – not even the maximum sentence – could have rectified the situation, could have brought Kihyun back, but there would have been some small consolation in the knowledge that his death hadn’t been brushed under the rug, that justice had been served.

“It was manslaughter,” Jooheon sighed. It wasn’t that he disagreed with Hyunwoo; rather, he often ended up playing devil’s advocate to remind Hyunwoo why the system functioned like it did. In the end, though, Hyunwoo knew his partner to be just as frustrated as himself. “Kihyun got stuck in the wrong place and the wrong time, and he caught a bullet that wasn’t intended for him. No intent, no murder.” Another sigh, longer this time. “The other case is a homicide, so it’s a priority. That’s the case they’re going to want to clear. This case isn’t a tragedy to them, it’s an opportunity.”

“Fucking parasites,” Hyunwoo muttered under his breath, glaring at several officers who were shaking hands with the defensive counsel in the front of the room. He knew, somewhere deep within his mind, that they didn’t want this criminal to get off scot free, that they saw him as a meal ticket to taking some bigger criminal down, but this was personal to him. He didn’t care about the bigger fish; he wanted to devour the smaller one.

The worst part about it was that it had absolutely nothing to do with Kihyun. It was simply the worst outcome of a wrong-place-wrong-time situation. Two rival gangs from the fourth quadrant plus a few errant bullets equaled one dead civilian. Simple, tragic math.

Everything just went to shit from there.

\--

Hyunwoo stopped at the fence on his usual route, but the boys weren’t outside. He hadn’t seen them outside since Kihyun had been killed, but this was the first time he’d walked by since the trial. Even if it was easier to avoid them, he’d wanted to bring the news in person.

“Go away!” someone yelled from one of the balconies, and Hyunwoo looked up to find Kihyun’s mom glaring down at him, flapping one of her arms like she could blow him away in the breeze. “Leave, you pig!”

Hyunwoo flinched; it wasn’t the first time he’d heard the moniker directed at him, but it was his first time hearing it from someone vaguely familiar. A few new threats joined the first, coming from another balcony as another resident caught sight of his uniform, and Hyunwoo ducked his head and hurried on down the street.

Kihyun’s killer had been brought before court only to escape true justice. In those officers’ minds, they were letting the little fish off the hook so they could snag the big fish, but in the minds of the Walour Motel residents, a killer was being allowed to get off with a light sentencing after murdering an innocent teenage boy.

\--

The small nods and waves Hyunwoo had been building up for years with the residents of the motel were gone. Instead, he received glares, shouts, horrible names. But he couldn’t be mad at them because he understood their anger all too well.

So he did his best to just walk quickly, always checking the lot for Hyungwon and Minhyuk, but he didn’t see them out anymore.

At first, he thought that maybe they were just staying inside, but after talking with the other officers who patrolled that quadrant, the boys still played outside on occasion, just not when Hyunwoo was on shift.

At first, he took that to mean that they were avoiding him, that they were angry at him, but given the hostility of the other motel residents, he thought that maybe it was a bit different. Maybe they didn’t want to get caught talking to him, or maybe they didn’t want him to get harassed for trying to talk to them.

Still, Hyunwoo couldn’t bear to walk past the motel anymore, so he talked to the chief and got his rotation switched so the Walour Motel was no longer on his quadrant four route. It was simply too painful for him to walk past and ignore the glaring absences.

On his last day, however, he wrote down a series of digits on a scrap of paper and taped the scrap to an empty pop can. He crouched down next to the fence of the Walour Motel and raised the bottom of the fence several inches, just high enough to slip the can under. Then he let the fence fall back down before he resumed his route, eyes drinking in the sight of the old motel one last time.

He hoped that at some point later that day or the next, Minhyuk would get curious and pick up the can to find Hyunwoo’s phone number and a short message:

_Call me if you ever need anything._


	9. Chapter 9

> _“I've crossed some kind of invisible line. I feel as if I've come to a place I never thought I'd have to come to. And I don't know how I got here. It's a strange place. It's a place where a little harmless dreaming and then some sleepy, early-morning talk has led me into considerations of death and annihilation.”_
> 
> _― Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories_

“I’m sorry to bother you,” Minhyuk said, a clear note of hesitance in his tone.

Five years had passed since Hyunwoo had returned the kids to their families, and three years had passed since Kihyun’s death. Throughout that time, Minhyuk had called frequently, often just to talk Hyunwoo’s ear off about this or that. Hyungwon never called.

“It’s no bother,” Hyunwoo responded, sitting up in bed and rubbing at his eyes. He slipped on a pair of reading glasses from his bedside table and squinted at the digits on his alarm clock.

_12:53_

“Sorry, I woke you up, didn’t I?” Minhyuk asked, sounding apologetic enough to almost hang up, and Hyunwoo quickly reassured him.

“No, I was just...resting my eyes, I wasn’t really sleeping.”

“Uh huh,” Minhyuk said with a soft chuckle before pausing. “I really am sorry to bother you, Hyunwoo. But...” A quiet hesitance. “I wouldn’t have called if it wasn’t important.”

“What is it then?” Hyunwoo asked with a small frown that Minhyuk couldn’t see. He held the phone to his ear with one hand even as he was sliding out of bed and patting down his chair, trying to locate the pair of pants he’d left there.

“Hyungwon,” Minhyuk said, his voice soft with an air of both sadness and affection. “I just...he doesn’t want me to call you, but...he’s not in a good place, and...he won’t even listen to _me_ anymore really. And without Kihyun... I just...don’t know who else to go to. I tried talking with him last night, but he wouldn’t listen. Just pretended I wasn’t there. He said he was invisible or something and that I couldn’t see him, something weird like that. It scared me a little bit. I was hoping you could check up on him.”

“All right,” Hyunwoo said, having managed to shove his legs into the pants and hike them up before realizing they were on backwards and having to repeat the process. He shrugged his arms, one after the other, into a jacket he’d left draped over a kitchen chair, and he fished for his keys in the bowl of miscellaneous items by the door. He sifted through several mints, a few coins of varying denominations, and what felt like a paperclip before he managed to snatch his keys up. “I’m on my way. Do you know where he is right now? If it’s near the motel, I can be there in fifteen minutes.”

“He’s been hanging out in this one building lately,” Minhyuk said before giving him the address with additional directions before apologizing again for waking him and asking if Hyunwoo wouldn’t mind checking in with Minhyuk later to let him know how it went.

Hyunwoo gave him his word that he would, and then he was in his car and heading toward quadrant four.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen Hyungwon. Before Kihyun had died, he and Minhyuk had still hung out in the parking lot every now and then, but most of the time it had been occupied by younger boys who Hyunwoo didn’t know as well. Even on the rare occasion where he’d found the two in the lot, Hyungwon had almost never been with them.

He’d thought he’d seen Hyungwon standing outside on the balcony of one of the rooms, but when Hyunwoo had tried to wave up at him, the figure had vanished back inside, leaving Hyunwoo unsure as to whether or not it had really been him in the first place. All his efforts to check in on the boy had gone unrewarded, and after Kihyun’s death and his patrol switch to avoid the motel, he only got news of him through Minhyuk who had assured him that Hyungwon was fine.

But if he was fine, then Minhyuk wouldn’t have called him at one in the morning.

He parked outside the building Minhyuk had told him. It was a block or two over from the Walour Motel and looked to be an unfinished complex. Most of the windows on the lower levels had been boarded over to keep out squatters, but as Hyunwoo looked up, he saw that the upper floors simply had gaping holes in the walls, windows that had never been filled.

He got out of his car, locked it and slipped the keys in his pocket. Then he began walking around the building, looking for an entry point. He could always break or remove one of the boards, but it would be easier to slip in through a pre-existing aperture.

About halfway around the building, he found that one of the boards had actually been pried up from the bottom, and if he pulled it outward, he could create a space just large enough for himself to slip through. He did so rather ungracefully, stumbling into the interior of the building and putting a hand against the wall as he gave himself time for his eyes to adjust to the dimness within. Some light from the windows on upper floors spilled down through cracks and openings that had been left in the flooring, likely for pipes or cables.

With the help of the faint illumination, he navigated to the stairwell and began climbing. The darkness lifted a bit more with each level, and when he’d finally reached the top, some of the light from streetlights outside filtered into the openings within the building, marking the silhouette of a figure curled up in one of the windows.

Hyunwoo moved slowly, not bothering to soften his footsteps so as not to surprise Hyungwon by his approach. Even though Hyungwon had to have heard him, he didn’t move or react. In fact, he wasn’t even looking over at Hyunwoo. His head was turned to the right, his back to Hyunwoo, and he was gazing out at the city. Hyunwoo wondered what exactly it was he was seeing. If he was seeing anything at all.

He stopped a few paces away from Hyungwon, not wanting to crowd him but wanting to be near enough for Hyungwon to feel, instinctively, that he wasn’t alone. Now that he was closer, he could make out Hyungwon’s left arm, which was resting on top of his knee, and in his hand, a cigarette. The end of it gave off the barest red glow, the only color in the whole room, and he wondered how long Hyungwon had been out here. Hyunwoo waited for Hyungwon to say something, but after several minutes of silence, it was clear that he wouldn’t be the first one to speak.

“Hyungwon,” Hyunwoo said, trying to keep his voice even. Standing here now felt like he was being forced to look at himself in a mirror, to hold his own guilt before himself and be unable to look away. In how many ways had he failed them?

Still, Hyungwon didn’t respond. Hyunwoo wasn’t even sure that he’d heard him.

“Hyungwon, I’m just here to talk,” Hyunwoo tried again, taking several cautious steps to his left so he might be closer within Hyungwon’s peripheral vision.

He hadn’t really been expecting a response, so when Hyungwon spoke, it startled him a bit. “It’s a bit late for a chat, isn’t it?” he asked, and Hyunwoo realized it must have been a long time since he’d heard the other’s voice because it was surprisingly smooth and reserved, nothing like the bright voice he’d heard all those years ago on the other side of the fence. It was just another reminder that Hyungwon wasn’t a boy anymore. He wasn’t truly a man yet either; he was somewhere in between.

“Did Minhyuk call you?” Hyungwon asked after Hyunwoo had been silent for too long. “I bet he did,” Hyungwon said quietly, more to himself than to Hyunwoo.

“He’s just worried about you,” Hyunwoo offered up since there was no point in keeping his caller anonymous when Hyungwon already knew it to be Minhyuk.

“If he’s so worried about me, then why did he send you? Why not come here himself?” Hyungwon asked, and he looked down at his hand, frowning at the cigarette as though surprised to see it there, as though he’d forgotten how he’d gotten to this point in time at all. He tapped the cigarette against the edge of the window’s ledge, the side facing the street, and he watched the ashes fall down onto the city like dirty snow. Then he stamped the glowing end of the cigarette against the concrete within the building and left the cigarette in a grave of other cigarette corpses. It was hard to see in the poor lighting, but Hyunwoo thought he could make out about two dozen old cigarettes. How often did Hyungwon come up here? And how many cigarettes did he smoke a night? How many hours had he spent curled up in this lonesome cutout of a forgotten window-to-be?

“I’m not sure,” Hyunwoo admitted, sensing that honesty was all Hyungwon would tolerate. He watched as the hand that had previously been holding a cigarette began shaking slightly, and Hyungwon, as though sensing Hyunwoo’s eyes, tucked his hand into his pocket of his sweatshirt. “It’s a little cold,” Hyunwoo said despite knowing that the shaking had nothing to do with the cold. “Shouldn’t you be wearing a coat or at least a jacket?”

“You know, I don’t talk much to Minhyuk anymore,” Hyungwon said, ignoring Hyunwoo’s last comment and returning to his previous train of thought. “I’m not even sure why he’d send you here. Or how he knew I was up here. He came up here yesterday, but I was invisible then. He couldn’t see me.”

Hyunwoo didn’t know what to make of the end bit, so he focused on what he could understand. “Why don’t you two talk?” Hyunwoo asked, the corners of his mouth pulling down. When had been the last time that Minhyuk had told him that Hyungwon was fine? How long ago had that been? And when exactly had they stopped talking? “You two have been friends for so long, what happened? Wouldn’t Kihyun want you guys to take care of each other?” He sensed that he was close to hitting a nerve with all of his questions, and he got quiet, wanting to give Hyungwon space to talk.

“Kihyun could never mind his own business,” Hyungwon answered, not much of an answer at all really, as he sighed, pressing his back further against the concrete column behind him. It looked as though he might just sink into it and become part of the structure of the building. “And Minhyuk...Minhyuk is okay,” he finished with an unexpected bitterness to his tone.

“Minhyuk is okay,” Hyunwoo repeated, doing his best to keep his tone even and soft rather than belie his curiosity. “Minhyuk is okay, and you...”

“Minhyuk is fine, just fucking dandy, and I...” Hyungwon paused to give his head a few sharp shakes. “He’s _fine_ ,” he repeated, raw anger and distress pouring out of his with each word. “He hasn’t changed at all. Nothing’s changed. It’s like it never happened.”

“But it did happen,” Hyunwoo said, his voice small now, as tiny as possible while Hyungwon’s anger and sadness and fear grew and grew, eating up all the empty space around them. “It did happen, and you’re not fine,” he filled in, speaking slowly, treading carefully, ready for Hyungwon to snap at him at any second. “And it’s hard to talk to Minhyuk when it looks to you like he’s unaffected by what happened, right?”

Hyungwon didn’t say anything, by the wan light from outside highlighted the tense set of his jaw. “He’s fine,” he muttered after a few moments, shaking his head but still refusing to look over at Hyunwoo. “He’s fucking fine.” A small, derisive chuckle that came and went like an arrow, fleeting, slicing through the air, and then gone.

“But he’s not, not really,” Hyunwoo said, hesitating to speak about it because it really wasn’t his right to divulge the private conversations he’d had with Minhyuk since then but he didn’t know what else to say to Hyungwon right now if not the truth. But he couldn’t exactly tell him that Minhyuk called him sometimes and just cried for ten minutes before hanging up, can he? “He calls me sometimes, and he’s...he’s not fine, Hyungwon. I know it might look that way to you, but-”

“You were always on his side,” Hyungwon interrupted, his voice quiet and dead. Hyunwoo preferred the rage, the anger to this emptiness that he heard now.

“What do you mean?” Hyunwoo asked, brow furrowing slightly because he honestly wasn’t sure what Hyungwon meant.

“Minhyuk. You’re always siding with him, picking him over me. Of course you’d defend him, even now.”

“Hyungwon, I’m not picking him over you-”

“You did back then, too,” Hyungwon said quietly, and Hyunwoo stilled because he knew exactly what Hyungwon was referring to, and the guilt that was staring back at him was opening its maw and devouring him whole.

“I’m so sorry,” Hyunwoo whispered, looking down because he was too much of a coward to face the boy (man?) in front of him. “I’m so fucking sorry Hyungwon-”

“We were both there. You could have chosen either one of us. It wouldn’t have really made a difference. But you chose him. You could have picked me, but you picked him.” His voice was calm, indifferent, but Hyunwoo knew that indifference to be a lie.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated because it was all he could do. Words didn’t matter now. Only actions had any lasting effect, and he’d taken actions that had hurt Hyungwon. Hyungwon was absolutely correct; that night when he’d gone undercover, he could have made an appointment with either of the boys. But he’d chosen Minhyuk out of necessity for the operation, thinking that Minhyuk, as the older child, might have more intel, might be more psychologically stable. And despite the hundreds of nights that Hyunwoo had second-guessed his decision, he couldn’t really fault himself for it. He’d seen how out of it Hyungwon had been once they’d recovered him, how disassociated he’d become. Hyunwoo would never get the chance to know whether or not things would have turned out okay if he’d picked Hyungwon instead that night because that wasn’t how life worked. He didn’t get to magically live out hypothetical alternative choices and see whether or not they’d have been successful. No, he had to live with the choices he’d made and the victims he’d created.

“It wouldn’t have really made a difference though, right?” Hyungwon asked, still looking out over the city. Was he searching for something he’d lost? Or just observing the lives of people who were okay in a way he wasn’t? “What’s one more night compared to weeks of torture?”

“Hyungwon-”

“You made the right call,” Hyungwon interrupted, finally turning his head to look over at Hyunwoo, who fell silent. “Better to save at least one kid than lose two, right?”

“Hyungwon, what do you mean?” Hyunwoo asked, cold panic taking flight in his veins at the possibilities of his insinuation. “Why do I have to lose anyone? Why do I have to lose _you_?”

“I’ve been gone for a long time,” Hyungwon said, looking back out the window and taking those haunting eyes off Hyunwoo. “But it’s hard to know you’ve lost something until you remember that it exists in the first place.”

“I didn’t forget about you,” Hyunwoo argued, the icy panic in his veins giving way for the briefest flare of anger. “I looked for you, Hyungwon. But you were never there anymore. And I gave you my number but you never called me. You avoided me, how was I supposed to-”

“I’m not blaming you,” Hyungwon said, and his words didn’t hold any malice. “You’re right; I avoided you.” His voice grew quieter still. “I avoided a lot of people.” He paused, inhaling shakily. “It was hard...being around people. Talking. Listening. It’s still hard.” He pulled his hands out of his pocket and looked down at them, and even though the cigarette was gone, he still looked surprised to see them. “I don’t even...sometimes I forget.”

“Forget what?” Hyunwoo asked, and something about the change of tone in Hyungwon’s voice concerned him, that faraway dispassionate curiosity of someone seeing themselves for the first time through the eyes of a strange.

“That I’m still here,” Hyungwon said, and the shaking of his hands brought a confused shine to his eyes. “Why am I still here?” He looked over at Hyunwoo, his face shaped in a helpless question.

“Hyungwon-”

“I don’t know how long it’s been,” Hyungwon said, turning his head to the right once more and looking out over the city, that confusion still on his face, his question unanswered. “I live in my head so much, it’s hard to keep track of when I’m living in...whatever this is. Here. But even now, even this, you...” He looked over at Hyunwoo as though just taking him in now, as though there were a wall of glass between them, some impenetrable plane that separated them, a wall that could not be crossed. “It’s hard to know if this is all in my head too.” He stared at Hyunwoo, his eyes questioning but without the drive of true interest. “It’s hard to know,” he repeated, and he looked back out the window.

“I’m real, Hyungwon,” Hyunwoo said, swallowing as he raced to think of all the steps he’d need to take. Hoseok – he should call Hoseok and see if he could talk with Hyungwon. Clearly Hyungwon needed help, professional help that Hyunwoo wasn’t equipped to give. But should he call Hoseok and tell him to come here? Or would Hyungwon go with him willingly? “I’m real, and you’re real, too.” For now, he just had to go along with it.

“But that’s the thing,” Hyungwon said, his voice sounding odd, like a child who couldn’t figure out how two blocks fit together. “I don’t want to be real. I want to be invisible. I want to disappear.” He tilted his head. “Do you know what my mom asked me? After you brought me home?” He shook his head. “She asked me where the money was. She said if they were really selling me, then there would be money, and where was the money? Where was her money? I wasn’t invisible then, she could see me and she kept asking me and screaming at me.”

He paused, and his next words came out in a whisper, his train of thought fragmented as he seemed to step backward in his mind. “I’ve been invisible before. I’m invisible a lot, actually. It’s a rather nice feeling. I think I’d like to be invisible like that forever.”

“Hyungwon,” Hyunwoo said, calling his name more harshly this time and unable to hide the panic from his tone. “I don’t want you to be invisible, I want to talk with you and see you. I want you to stay here, to stay visible, to be real, to be here.”

“But I don’t exist. I’m not even here.” Hyungwon’s gaze over the city turned upward, and although Hyunwoo couldn’t make out the moon and the stars, he imagined that Hyungwon could from his angle. “I don’t exist,” Hyungwon repeated, more quietly this time, and then, “None of this matters.”

“Hyungwon-!”

But the boy was already tumbling out the window, and although Hyunwoo darted forward, reaching out with a prayer of grabbing a hand or an arm, the boy was already beyond his reach, and Hyunwoo watched as the boy became invisible on the street below.


	10. Chapter 10

> _“Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.”_
> 
> _― Raymond Carver, The Bridle_

“I’m sorry,” Hyunwoo apologized, bowing his head, but he felt a hand clap on his shoulder and he looked up.

“There’s nothing to apologize for,” the chief told him with a tired look in his eye. “You’ve worked hard for us these past few years, and we’re grateful for that.”

Hyunwoo just gave a vague nod and turned toward the door, but the chief cleared his throat.

“Just one quick question, Officer. Did you have any particular requests for your transfer? Anywhere you want to go? I can put in a good word for you.”

Hyunwoo waved his hand in the air. “Anywhere is fine, sir.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.” Hyunwoo left the office and headed to his desk. He’d cleared it out yesterday after spending most of the day in the hospital and then the morgue. He’d listened with deaf ears as the medical examiners had told him about a series of injection marks in Hyungwon’s arm over where his old patches of eczema had used to be, and he stood there while they read him the toxicology reports and told him more things he didn’t want to hear. Hyungwon’s body was lying beneath a sheet just in front of him, but Hyunwoo didn’t look. Hyungwon’s last wish had been to be invisible, after all. He would honor that to whatever degree he could.

“Hey,” interrupted a voice to his right, and Hyunwoo looked over to see Jooheon standing at his desk, staring at Hyunwoo with those eyes that had seen too much. “I heard about Hyungwon,” Jooheon said, mouth fidgeting as he fought with a few different expressions, finally settling on a grimace. “I’m sorry.”

And Hyunwoo had to wonder whether Jooheon was sorry about what had happened or sorry about not having emotionally invested himself in the kids like Hyunwoo had. He’d warned Hyunwoo, to be fair. He’d told him what would happen, and Hyunwoo hadn’t wanted to listen. But even so...it wouldn’t have changed anything. Hyunwoo could understand Jooheon’s position in trying to remain uninvolved, to keep his personal and professional life separate so he could do the job, but Hyunwoo wasn’t Jooheon.

He’d said it all along. He wasn’t cut out for this. He was a prop cop who’d forgotten that he wasn’t real. It was time to go back to the show and put on his costume and his shiny badge and forget about rundown motels and parking lots full of caterpillars and cans and kids who had ceased to exist.

Hyunwoo just shrugged in response to Jooheon’s words, too numb to say anything back and too wounded to trust anything that came out of his mouth.

“You’re leaving?” Jooheon asked, looking down at his desk with a frown. “Because of...”

“I’m just a little tired,” Hyunwoo deflected, looking down at his own desk and seeing a blank spot where his nameplate should have been.

Jooheon was quiet for a long moment. “Tired as in you need more sleep, or tired as in...”

“I asked for a transfer,” Hyunwoo said, still unable to look over at his partner of five years. “I think I just need a change of scenery.”

If Jooheon sensed the incompleteness of Hyunwoo’s words, he didn’t call him on it. Instead, he stuck out his hand, although his eyes flickered downward. “You always had my back, and I just _know_ I’m going to hate whoever they put at your desk, but...” He clenched his jaw. “It was an honor to work with you.”

Hyunwoo looked over at his outstretched hand, and after a moment, he forced himself to take it, looking up briefly to meet Jooheon’s eyes before looking back down because he couldn’t hold his sharp gaze. “You too,” he said, squeezing Jooheon’s hand.

“Hoseok is off for the morning but he’ll be in later if you want to say goodbye,” Jooheon offered as they both pulled their hands back to their sides. “We can throw you a little party and everything. We’ve got a decent chunk of change built up in the yawn jar, I bet we can pick up a cake and some balloons or something.”

“I don’t know,” Hyunwoo said, rubbing at the back of his neck. The thought of standing before Hoseok and his analytical gaze was troubling to him. He was afraid that Hoseok would try to fix him, would try to make this horrible pain go away, and he wasn’t ready to part with the loss just yet.

Jooheon just grinned at him. “C’mon, it’s your goodbye party, you have to come.”

“Yeah...yeah, okay,” Hyunwoo agreed, giving Jooheon a small smile before snaking his keys out of his pocket. “I’ve gotta go take care of a few things for now though.”

“All right,” Jooheon said, scooting to the side so Hyunwoo could get past him. “We’ll see you later then?”

Hyunwoo gave a half nod. “Take care,” he said, and Jooheon repeated the same to him as he walked past.

\--

The drive to Widowmaker’s Bridge took longer than he’d thought, mostly because it was only accessible through a series of smaller roads and because he’d only driven out there once or twice before while on duty. He parked his car on one end of the bridge and began walking toward the center.

The bridge was empty at this time of day. In the evening, some of the local junkies would likely gather, although maybe not tonight if they saw his car parked there.

He wondered if Hyungwon had been coming out here.

He stopped in the dead center of the bridge and rested his forearms on the railing. He remembered dropping Hyungwon off all those years ago, turning to Jooheon and telling him that it was a bad idea, and Jooheon saying that it was the only thing they could do for him. He remembered watching as Hyungwon’s addict mother had clutched him close to her chest, and he remembered Hyungwon’s back and how he’d read the pain there. He’d known that Hyungwon wasn’t okay, and yet he’d let him go back there.

That was the last day he’d heard his voice since he’d seen him in that building, and that was why it had surprised him so much when Hyungwon had spoken to him. Voice showed the passage of time even when skin didn’t, carried the pain even when there were no scars on display.

What if he would have brought Hoseok with him that night? Would that have changed anything? What if he’d talked to Hyungwon sooner and heard the scars his skin was hiding?

He shook his head, dispelling the fantasy that there was any other outcome that could have occurred. He’d told himself as much the other night when he’d tried to figure out if picking Hyungwon would have been the right choice. But in the end, choices were just rocks in a river; the water of time streamed around them and continued flowing, uninterrupted.

Choices didn’t matter.

_“None of this matters.”_

“I don’t exist,” Hyunwoo whispered, testing out Hyungwon’s last words. “I’m not even here.” He looked down at the water running beneath the bridge, the current fast and strong, the rocks sharp and dark. Normally, the fear of heights would have made him avert his gaze, but it was easier to stare down now. Perhaps, once he’d relinquished his existence, his _hereness_ , he’d relinquished that fear as well. Or maybe it was the simple fact that not being _here_ seemed to make none of this real. He wondered if that was how it worked for Hyungwon, that by being invisible, his fears became invisible as well. “I don’t exist,” Hyunwoo whispered, his words mere murmurs beneath the crashing waters below. “None of this matters.”

And then Hyunwoo became invisible too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Would y'all be interested in my research sources and conclusions for this piece of writing? I can post them in an afterward like I usually do on Wattpad if you guys are curious.
> 
> Anywho, thanks for reading!
> 
> Want to buy me a cup of coffee (or hot chocolate haha)? : https://ko-fi.com/nobodyimportant


	11. Afterward

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At least one person was interested in the research, so here y'all go! Fun facts about the book, references you might not have caught, and a little bit of source material.

As always, thanks for reading (and congrats on making it through yet another angsty work)! This is the part of the show where I hand out a few thank yous and throw some research at you.

First, a big thank you to [myshatae](https://www.wattpad.com/user/myshatae), who introduced me to the movie "Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)" from which I stole a title and a little dialogue. Watching this film honestly got me through a period of writer's block and helped me finish the story when I'd been stuck on the ending. So, if you're unhappy with the ending – well, I don't want to say it's Mysha's fault per se, but...mayhaps :)

The title of this work is a reference to the movie (partially because I thought it fit well and also because I'm lazy and hate naming things). A sort of bonus reference to the movie is seen in the last bits of dialogue between Hyungwon and Hyunwoo. In "Birdman," the play within the movie ends after Riggan says the final lines, "I don't exist. I'm not even here. I don't exist. None of this matters" before the character's death. Hyungwon says these words before his death, and Hyunwoo repeats Hyungwon.

Since the play within "Birdman" is an adaptation of Raymond Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," I decided to introduce each chapter with a quote from Carver. Again, just me thieving from better writers. So that's just another tip of the hat to "Birdman" and its origins since I was rather fascinated by the film. If you haven't seen it, it's worth a confusing and perplexing watch.

As for the research behind this book (is this really a book? It's only around 40K words...a novella, perhaps?), I'd like to provide some context and sources for you interested readers. I don't know if I did more research before this work than others or if I simply saved more sources, but I'll just put the main highlights here since I had a lot of material saved. Disclaimer: I am not a licensed psychologist; I'm simply a curious person with access to the internet, so don't mistake my curiosity for legitimate credibility. That said, feel free to ask any questions, and I'll answer with what I know.

\--

1) In the chapter where Hoseok explains some of the psychological theory behind coping mechanisms, he mentions four categories. Now, this is just according to one particular study I found, but I think it holds up fairly well with other models. As mentioned previously, the four main strategies identified are "avoidant coping, internalized coping, angry coping, and active/social coping" (see School Age Children's Coping...). Avoidant coping mechanisms were found to result in fewer behavioral problems but increased sexual anxieties, and internalized coping resulted in "increased guilt and PTSD hyperarousal symptoms." Active/social coping was found to have no clear relation to either symptoms or benefits, and angry coping resulted in a variety of behavioral and emotional issues.

2) The ending of this piece frequently mentions "invisibility." I found this interesting because "Birdman" seems to be in constant tension with the idea of visibility; the main character is fighting desperately to _be_ visible, to be _something_ , to be _remembered_. Hyungwon, in the end, wants just the opposite. This is a result of his coping mechanism, which is described a bit in chapter 7.

Hoseok notes that Hyungwon is utilizing some form of dissociation (an avoidant coping mechanism) to distance himself from his trauma. With dissociative coping strategies, the subject "develops the ability to mentally leave the abusive event as it is happening. The journey they make is inside their heads, to try to find a safe place" (see How Do Children Cope...). Similarly, individuals may try to block out trauma with the aid of substances such as alcohol or drugs in an effort to repress memories or emotions.

While both these mechanisms apply to Hyungwon in part, the coping strategy most emphasized in the ending is known as "disappearing," also known as "fading" or "spacing out" (see How Do Children Cope...). This section of the article was rather interesting: "I used to work with a girl and you could almost see her shutters come down. Physically they are present but actually they have gone inside their heads. One of the adult survivors I worked with described to me how she would spend up to a third of her waking day 'invisible.' ...she was pretty sure that when she was in this state other people stopped seeing her." As with dissociative strategies, "disappearing" is the individual's attempt to avoid dealing with the real world.

3) While Hyungwon's coping mechanisms emulate aspects of dissociation, Minhyuk is described to cope in a different manner. Now, to be entirely honest, the coping mechanism I assigned him wasn't necessarily within the four categories of coping that I came across during my research, but there's some science behind it nonetheless. Hoseok observes that Minhyuk seems to be coping by caring for Hyungwon. In this manner, Minhyuk is setting compassionate goals, which were defined in one study as "striving to help others and avoiding selfish behavior...making a positive difference in someone else's life" (see How Helping Others...). According to the study, which was observed over 6 weeks, compassionate goals "were associated with lower levels of symptoms and less relationship conflict." So while I can't propose that this is an entirely realistic response to sexual trauma, there may be some psychological justification behind caring for others as a personal coping mechanism.

4) The process of trafficking has been broken down by the UN into 3 main phases: the act ("recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring, or receipt of persons"), the means ("threat or use of force, coercion, abduction, fraud, deception, abuse of power or vulnerability, or giving payments or benefits to a person in control of the victim"), and the purpose ("exploiting the prostitution of others, sexual exploitation, forced labor, slavery or similar practices and the removal of organs") (see Child Trafficking: Myth vs. Fact). Additionally, in the recruitment substage of the first phase, it's a sad reality for the majority of cases that victims are trafficked by someone they know. In some cases I came across during the process of research, I read about children who were trafficked by a parent (see Trafficking's Invisible Victims...) or by their parent's partner (see He was targeted...). In the case of this work, Hyungwon and Minhyuk were trafficked through Hendy, who was a somewhat familiar character from their neighborhood.

5) At one point in the story, Minhyuk mentions that all the children were gathered in one room, and some of them (including Hyungwon) were chosen to be sexually abused thereafter. This scene, as well as the motel setting in and of itself, was partially based off an article I read from the perspective of a male child who was a victim of sex trafficking in Thailand I believe (see Boys are Sold...). The setting of the larger Tampa area was inspired by a separate article which also tells the perspective of a victim and mentions being "traded around in rooms with other children at times" (see He was Targeted).

6) There are many damaging long-term effects of this type of abuse. Some of the articles I read mentioned suicide attempts subsequent to the abuse (see He was Targeted, Who Buys a Trafficked Child...). Victims are also at higher risk for abusing substances such as alcohol and/or drugs (see How Do Children Cope), although it should be noted that this behavior may be a perpetuation of an addiction created and maintained by the perpetrator of the abuse (see Case Reveals Trauma). In such cases, people who trafficked children may have forcibly addicted them to substances or offered up substances in order to gain leverage over the child and establish dependence upon the perpetrator (see Child Sex Trafficking). Particularly in cases featuring a male victim of sex trafficking, feelings of shame dominate their psyche most likely due to the social expectation that males should be able to resist victimhood more successfully than women (see Case Reveals Trauma, Who Buys a Trafficked Child).

7) Originally when writing this story, I had been planning to take a more digital approach. The exploitation of children has been facilitated through use of the Internet and will continue to grow in influence over the course of our future, as the Internet can increase the scope of a trafficker's market and reach to interested clientele (see Child Sex Trafficking). I'll leave you with a sobering quote – "Sex trafficking is an ever-present and growing issue in our society, but here's the more uncomfortable side of that statement: it means more people are okay with supporting it with money, clicks, views, and downloads" (see Did You Know).

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References:

"How Do Children Cope with Sexual Abuse" - <https://my.optimus-education.com/how-do-children-cope-sexual-abuse>

"Child Trafficking: Myth vs. Fact" - <https://www.savethechildren.org/us/charity-stories/child-trafficking-myths-vs-facts>

"He was targeted for human trafficking through his mom. Now, he shares his story to help others." - <https://www.wtsp.com/article/news/local/he-was-targeted-for-human-trafficking-through>-his-mom-now-he-shares-his-story-to-help-others/67-9d294d1d-13f6-4ce2-b451-66c17b7e2b8b

"Trafficking's invisible victims: Boys trapped in the sex trade" - <https://www.foxnews.com/us/invisible-victims-boys-trapped-in-the-sex-trade>

"How Helping Others Can Relieve Anxiety and Depression" - <https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/think-act-be/201710/how-helping-others-can-relieve-anxiety-and-depression>

"School age children's coping with sexual abuse: abuse stresses and symptoms associated with four coping strategies" - <https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9056102/>

"Boys are Sold for Sex, Too" - <https://blog.theexodusroad.com/human-trafficking-stats-stories-boys-are-sold-too>

"Who buys a trafficked child for sex? Otherwise ordinary men" - <https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/nation-now/2018/01/30/sex-trafficking-column/1073459001/>

"Case reveals trauma of male sex trafficking victims" - <https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/nation/2018/11/15/male-sex-trafficking-victims/38535701/>

"Child Sex Trafficking" - <https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ceos/child-sex-trafficking>

"Did You Know Men And Boys Can Be Victims Of Sex Trafficking, Too?" - <https://fightthenewdrug.org/men-and-boys-who-are-sex-trafficked/>

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Thanks for reading, and let me know what you thought of "The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance"!


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